I.—The Glacial Controversy in New Zealand

1917 ◽  
Vol 4 (6) ◽  
pp. 241-245 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. T. Trechmann
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Ice Sheet ◽  
Pleistocene Glaciation ◽  
The South ◽  
The North

The controversy which has arisen in recent years in New Zealand regarding the problem of the Pleistocene glaciation of that country resolves itself into the two following main questions:—1. Was there any glaciation in the North Island?2. Was there an ice-sheet covering the South Island?

scholarly journals Ecological impact and spread of an invasive paper wasp in New Zealand (Hymenoptera: Vespidae)

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Howse
Keyword(s):  
At Risk ◽  
Invasive Species ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Ecological Impact ◽  
Diet Analysis ◽  
Paper Wasp ◽  
Gut Contents ◽  
Suitable Habitat ◽  
The South ◽  
The North

<p><b>Social wasps are considered among the most successful and impactful invasive species in the world. One species, Polistes dominula has spread from its native Mediterranean range to every continent except Antarctica. This wasp reached New Zealand in the last decade where it has established in the north of the South Island, however, reports of its presence are increasing throughout the country. Due to its recent arrival in New Zealand, little is known about where this species is likely to establish or what impacts it may have on local insect communities. In this thesis, I conducted two studies to investigate these questions, providing valuable information that may inform future management of this invasive species. </b></p><p>In chapter 2, I used two bioclimatic modelling methods to predict areas of suitable habitat across four regions in the southern hemisphere. These models were informed by global temperature and precipitation data as well as global distribution occurrence data of P. dominula. These data were used to estimate conditions most highly correlated with the presence of this wasp. The models identified large areas across the target regions that were climatically suitable for the establishment of P. dominula. Many of these areas are not known to currently contain populations of this species, representing habitat potentially vulnerable to further invasion by P. dominula. Areas across South America, South Africa and Australia were predicted to be climatically suitable. In New Zealand, much of the North Island and eastern parts of the South Island were predicted to be suitable habitat for this wasp. These results suggest that P. dominula could potentially establish across more of the country and expand its invaded range. Information provided by these models may guide conservation and biosecurity management by highlighting key areas where prevention and mitigation should be prioritized. </p><p>In chapter 3, I used molecular diet analysis to investigate the range of prey being utilised by P. dominula in New Zealand. Using DNA barcoding, larval gut contents of P. dominula and another closely related species, Polistes chinensis, were analysed to identify what species were present in the diet of both wasps. Butterflies and moths (Lepidoptera) were found to be the most highly represented order in both species’ diets. True bugs (Hemiptera) and flies (Diptera) were also abundant. Both wasps were shown to consume a range of native and introduced species including a number of agricultural pests. P. dominula was found to utilise a wider range of prey than P. chinensis. This more diverse prey range, combined with known differences in nesting behaviour, suggest that P. dominula may represent a more significant threat to invertebrate diversity than the already well-established P. chinensis. These results may inform conservation and biosecurity managers on which species are most at risk where this new invasive wasp becomes established. </p><p>This thesis provides insights into the potential impacts of a new invasive species to New Zealand. Both chapters represent the first time that these methods have been used to study P. dominula. This work highlights the need for continued monitoring of wasp populations throughout New Zealand, especially in regions highlighted as vulnerable to P. dominula establishment. We also suggest the need to prioritise the conservation of ‘at-risk’ species in coastal and human-altered habitats. Increased public engagement through the citizen-science initiatives should be encouraged while more research into management and control methods is recommended.</p>

The discovery of a new sedimentary basin: offshore Raukumara, East Coast, North Island, New Zealand

2008 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 53 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Uruski ◽  
Callum Kennedy ◽  
Rupert Sutherland ◽  
Vaughan Stagpoole ◽  
Stuart Henrys
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Oil And Gas ◽  
East Coast ◽  
Plate Boundary ◽  
Source Rocks ◽  
Fault System ◽  
Northern Coast ◽  
The South ◽  
Petroleum Potential ◽  
The North

The East Coast of North Island, New Zealand, is the site of subduction of the Pacific below the Australian plate, and, consequently, much of the basin is highly deformed. An exception is the Raukumara Sub-basin, which forms the northern end of the East Coast Basin and is relatively undeformed. It occupies a marine plain that extends to the north-northeast from the northern coast of the Raukumara Peninsula, reaching water depths of about 3,000 m, although much of the sub-basin lies within the 2,000 m isobath. The sub-basin is about 100 km across and has a roughly triangular plan, bounded by an east-west fault system in the south. It extends about 300 km to the northeast and is bounded to the east by the East Cape subduction ridge and to the west by the volcanic Kermadec Ridge. The northern seismic lines reveal a thickness of around 8 km increasing to 12–13 km in the south. Its stratigraphy consists of a fairly uniformly bedded basal section and an upper, more variable unit separated by a wedge of chaotically bedded material. In the absence of direct evidence from wells and samples, analogies are drawn with onshore geology, where older marine Cretaceous and Paleogene units are separated from a Neogene succession by an allochthonous series of thrust slices emplaced around the time of initiation of the modern plate boundary. The Raukumara Sub-basin is not easily classified. Its location is apparently that of a fore-arc basin along an ocean-to-ocean collision zone, although its sedimentary fill must have been derived chiefly from erosion of the New Zealand land mass. Its relative lack of deformation introduces questions about basin formation and petroleum potential. Although no commercial discoveries have been made in the East Coast Basin, known source rocks are of marine origin and are commonly oil prone, so there is good potential for oil as well as gas in the basin. New seismic data confirm the extent of the sub-basin and its considerable sedimentary thickness. The presence of potential trapping structures and direct hydrocarbon indicators suggest that the Raukumara Sub-basin may contain large volumes of oil and gas.

Ocean Cruising: A Sailing Subculture

1992 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 319-343 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jim Macbeth
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
North Atlantic ◽  
South Pacific ◽  
The South ◽  
Fringing Reef ◽  
The North ◽  
Hurricane Season ◽  
The North Atlantic ◽  
One Year

Just after dawn, an English couple in their 30's haul up their anchor and motor across the stillness of Suva harbour. The hurricane season is approaching and they are embarking on the 2–3 week trip to Bay of Islands New Zealand for the southern summer. Three months earlier, as their yacht lay aground on the fringing reef of uninhabited Suvarov atoll, they wondered if they'd ever reach New Zealand. But, with the help of other cruisers and lucky tides their steel 36 footer was clear and safe in under 24 hours. What was to be a one year trip around the north Atlantic was now happily way off course in the South Pacific and likely to remain so for some time. That is just a glimpse of one small aspect of ocean cruising, the subculture of interest here. However, throughout the paper the ethnography of cruising is developed further. A model is proposed to show how individuals come to share the subculture ideology and then to participate in the lifestyle. Subsequently, 1 will place ocean cruising in the context of subculture theory by expanding the ethnography and relating cruising to other subcultures.

scholarly journals Regional Variation in New Zealand English: the Taranaki Sing-Song Accent

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Helen Ainsworth
Keyword(s):  
Social Network ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Regional Variation ◽  
Regional Differences ◽  
The Elderly ◽  
The South ◽  
The North ◽  
Pitch Direction ◽  
Auditory Analysis ◽  
Pitch Movement

<p>Although lay people confidently assert the existence of regional varieties of New Zealand English, linguists have produced very little evidence to support such claims. There are vocabulary items special to, or favoured by, the people of Southland and the West Coast of the South Island; there are traces of non-prevocalic /r/in Southland and Otago; and there are regional differences in the playground language of New Zealand school children. Attempts to identify further differences between regions have generally not been successful. In most cases linguistic evidence has pointed to either social class or ethnic variation, but not to regional variation. Nevertheless, many New Zealanders assert that a Taranaki variety of New Zealand English exists. This study was designed to test the validity of the claim by comparing samples of New Zealand English from Taranaki with samples from Wellington. The Taranaki sample included speakers from New Plymouth (population 50,000) and the South Taranaki dairy farming community. The Wellington sample was drawn from the Greater Wellington region extending from Porirua in the north to suburbs on the southern coast of the city. Interviewees were located by the social network approach, otherwise known as the 'friend of a friend' approach advocated by Lesley Milroy (1980, 1987a). An index of rural orientation was devised to indicate the degree to which a speaker was oriented towards town or country. This proved helpful in distinguishing between genuinely regional differences, and rural versus urban differences. Factors of gender and age were also considered. It has been claimed that Taranaki English has a 'sing-song' quality, suggesting that an investigation of the intonation of Taranaki speakers would be worthwhile. Comparing features of the intonation of a Taranaki sample with a Wellington sample, this thesis attempts to isolate and measure what contributes to the 'sing-song' perception of Taranaki English. 'Singsong' in this context was taken to mean that the speaker had dynamic pitch; in other words their speech was characterised by a lot of movement up and down in pitch. Auditory analysis of speech samples was undertaken, and intonation features were derived from that analysis. Averaging the number of times a speaker changed pitch direction in each intonation group and then in each accent unit provided global measures of changes in pitch direction. Analysis of nuclear accents gave an indication of whether speakers favoured tunes which were characterised by pitch movement. And analysis of the manner in which accents were approached, whether with a boosted step up in pitch, or with a more standard onset, provided a narrower focus on the amount of pitch movement present. Results indicated that, in general, most Taranaki speakers in the sample showed more pitch dynamism than the Wellingtonians; for some features the males showed more pitch dynamism than the females; and, overall, the elderly speakers showed more pitch dynamism than the younger speakers. There were, however, important exceptions to these generalisations. Factors of Location, Gander and Age interacted significantly for all but one of the features examined and there were clear indications that intonational patterns are undergoing change in both regions studied. Explanations for the exceptional cases are explored in the thesis, and sociolinguistic, social network and geolinguistic theories provide possible clues as to the sources of the differences. Evidence of differences in the degree of pitch dynamism present in the intonation of the Taranaki and Wellington speakers supports claims about regional variation in New Zealand English intonation, but it does not in itself prove the existence of a uniquely Taranaki or a uniquely Wellington way of speaking English.</p>

scholarly journals Commensal Rodents in 19th Century Australasia: Diversity, Invasion Routes and the China Connection

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew James Veale ◽  
Carolyn King ◽  
Wayne Johnson ◽  
Lara Shepherd
Keyword(s):  
Genetic Diversity ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Dna Sequences ◽  
Archaeological Site ◽  
House Mice ◽  
Mus Musculus Domesticus ◽  
The South ◽  
The North ◽  
Founding Population ◽  
Norway Rats

Abstract The present genetic diversity of commensal rodent populations is often used to inform the invasion histories of these species, and as a proxy for historical events relating to the movement of people and goods. These studies assume that modern genetic diversity generally reflects early colonising events. We investigate this idea by sequencing the mitochondrial DNA of rodent bones found in a 19th-century archaeological site in The Rocks area of Sydney, Australia, the location of the first historical European port. We identified 19th-century bones from two species, Rattus norvegicus and Mus musculus domesticus. We found six genetic haplotypes in the 39 Norway rats, showing either multiple early introductions or a diverse initial founding population. One of them was identical with Norhap01 common in the North Island of New Zealand, but none was like the haplotype Norhap02 found throughout the South Island. We found three haplotypes in seven house mice, all belonging to the dominant subspecies established in Australia, M.m. domesticus. There was no evidence for M. m. castaneus or M. m. musculus having established there. We had few modern R. norvegicus and M. musculus DNA sequences from Sydney, but those we had did tentatively support the hypotheses that (1) modern samples can represent at least a preliminary estimate of historical diversities and origins, and (2) Asian haplotypes of both Norway rats and of house mice reached the South Island of New Zealand early in colonial times direct from China rather than through Port Jackson.

scholarly journals Phylogeography of southern New Zealand: Implications of Pliocene and Pleistocene Processes and Evolutionary Concordance Across Independent  Loci

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Shay B. O'Neill
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Sequence Data ◽  
Genetic Data ◽  
Phylogeographic Structure ◽  
The South ◽  
The North ◽  
Genealogical Concordance ◽  
Cook Strait ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Genetic Break

<p>The endemic fauna of the South Island has proven to be an ideal taxonomic group to examine the impact of climatic and geological processes on the evolution of New Zealand's biota since the Pliocene. This thesis examines the phylogeography of McCann's skink (Oligosoma maccanni) in order to provide insight into the relative contribution of Pliocene and Pleistocene processes on patterns of genetic structure in South Island biota. This thesis also investigates the phylogeography of the brown skink (O. zelandicum) to examine whether Cook Strait landbridges facilitated gene flow between the North and South Island in the late-Pleistocene. This thesis also investigates the presence of genealogical concordance across independent loci for the endemic alpine stick insect, Niveaphasma. I obtained mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) sequence data (ND2 and ND4; 1284 bp) from across the range of both skink species and mtDNA (COI; 762 bp) and nuclear sequence data (EF1 ; 590 bp) from across the range of Niveaphasma. I used DGGE in order to resolve nuclear EF1 alleles and examined phylogeographic patterns in each species using Neighbour-Joining, Maximum Likelihood and Bayesian methods. Substantial phylogeographic structure was found within O. maccanni, with divergences among clades estimated to have occurred during the Pliocene. Populations in the Otago/Southland region formed a well-supported lineage within O. maccanni. A genetic break was evident between populations in east and west Otago, while north-south genetic breaks were evident within the Canterbury region. There was relatively minor phylogeographic structure within O. zelandicum. Our genetic data supports a single colonization of the North Island by O. zelandicum from the South Island, with the estimated timing of this event (0.46 Mya) consistent with the initial formation of Cook Strait. There was substantial genetic structuring identified within Niveaphasma, with a well-supported lineage present in the Otago/Southland region. There was also a genetic break between populations in Canterbury and eastern Otago with those in central Otago and Southland. The genetic data provided strong genealogical concordance between mtDNA haplotypes and nuclear alleles suggesting an accurate depiction of the historical isolation identified between the major clades of Niveaphasma. This finding offers compelling evidence for the use of nuclear gene  phylogeography alongside mtDNA for future evolutionary studies within New Zealand.</p>

scholarly journals V.—On the South of England Ice-Sheet

1874 ◽  
Vol 1 (6) ◽  
pp. 257-257
Author(s):  
James Croll
Keyword(s):  
North American ◽  
Ice Sheet ◽  
American Continent ◽  
The South ◽  
North American Continent ◽  
The North ◽  
Glacial Epoch ◽  
Continuous Mass ◽  
Boulder Clay ◽  
Break Up

In the Reader, 14th October, 1865, and afterwards more fully in my papers on the “Boulder-clay of Caithness,” and on the “ Transport of the Wastdale Crag Blocks,” 2 the following were shown from physical considerations to be necessary results, viz.:—1. That were the ice of Greenland much thicker than it is at present, which it evidently was during the Glacial Epoch, it would not float in Davis Straits and Baffin's Bay, and consequently, would not break up into icebergs, but would move over upon the North American continent in one continuous mass, and pursue its course southwards, until it gradually melted away under the influence of the Sun's heat.

scholarly journals III.—Notes on Some Books from New Zealand

1905 ◽  
Vol 2 (9) ◽  
pp. 403-406 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. H. Rastall
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Volcanic Rocks ◽  
Present Writer ◽  
Lake District ◽  
The South ◽  
The North ◽  
Field Notes ◽  
Geological Map ◽  
The Antarctic

The specimens on which the following notes are based were JL collected by Mr. H. T. Ferrar, M.A., F.G.S., while on a tour through New Zealand, during the time the “Discovery” was being overhauled in Lyttelton, on her return from the Antarctic. The topographical and field notes were also supplied by Mr. Ferrar, and it must be clearly understood that only the detailed petrographical descriptions are the work of the present writer.The specimens were obtained near the middle of the North Island of New Zealand, and in the area marked “acidic volcanic rocks” in Sir James Hector's geological map of New Zealand, published in 1883. They all occur in the Taupo zone, the hot-lake district which lies roughly between Lake Taupo on the south and Lake Rotorua on the north.

371. The properties of New Zealand butters and butterfats I. Iodine, reichert and saponification values and softening points of monthly samples of butterfats from nine commercial factories over four years

1948 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 377-386 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. A. Cox ◽  
F. H. McDowall
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Northern Hemisphere ◽  
Iodine Value ◽  
The South ◽  
Monthly Average ◽  
The North ◽  
Four Seasons ◽  
Iodine Values ◽  
The One

Iodine values, Reichert values, saponification values and softening points of butterfats from butters collected at monthly intervals over a period of 4 years from 9 factories representative of the main butter-producing districts in New Zealand were determined. The trend of variation of any one property throughout the season was remarkably uniform, both for different factories in the one season, and for any one property in the four seasons. Weighted monthly average iodine values, Reichert values, saponification values and softening points for the butterfat from all factories over 4 years were 36.7 (33.8–40.2), 30.4 (25.5–32.3), 229.5 (225.5–232.7) and 33.1 (32.2–33.7) respectively. The minimum iodine value occurred in midsummer, i.e. at the season of the year when maximum values are reported for northern hemisphere butters. The iodine values for South Island butterfats diverged markedly from those for the North Island butterfats during the winter, i.e. at the time when turnips are fed to cows in the South. In spite of these lower iodine values, the softening points of the South Island butterfats were lower throughout the year.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document