Search Results (3)

The widespread perception of New Zealand is of a group of remote islands dominated by reptiles and birds, with no native mammals except a few bats. In fact, the islands themselves are only part of a wider New Zealand Region which includes a large section of Antarctica. In total, the New Zealand Region has at least 63 recognised taxa (species, subspecies and distinguishable clades) of living native mammals, only six of which are bats. The rest comprise a large and vigorous assemblage of 57 native marine mammals (9 pinnipeds and 48 cetaceans), protected from human knowledge until only a few centuries ago by their extreme isolation in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. Even after humans first began to colonise the New Zealand archipelago in about 1280 AD, most of the native marine mammals remained unfamiliar because they are seldom seen from the shore. This paper describes the huge contrast between the history and biogeography of the tiny fauna of New Zealand’s native land mammals versus the richly diverse and little-known assemblage of marine mammals. Full article

Much debate surrounds the importance of top-down and bottom-up effects in the Southern Ocean, where the harvesting of over two million whales in the mid twentieth century is thought to have produced a massive surplus of Antarctic krill. This excess of krill may have allowed populations of other predators, such as seals and penguins, to increase, a top-down hypothesis known as the ‘krill surplus hypothesis’. However, a lack of pre-whaling population baselines has made it challenging to investigate historical changes in the abundance of the major krill predators in relation to whaling. Therefore, we used reduced representation sequencing and a coalescent-based maximum composite likelihood approach to reconstruct the recent demographic history of the Antarctic fur seal, a pinniped that was hunted to the brink of extinction by 18th and 19th century sealers. In line with the known history of this species, we found support for a demographic model that included a substantial reduction in population size around the time period of sealing. Furthermore, maximum likelihood estimates from this model suggest that the recovered, post-sealing population at South Georgia may have been around two times larger than the pre-sealing population. Our findings lend support to the krill surplus hypothesis and illustrate the potential of genomic approaches to shed light on long-standing questions in population biology. Full article

Patrick O’Brian inspired this work, with his 1934 book of chronicles “Beasts Royal,” where he gives a voice to animals. Therein, among other animals, we find Skogula, a young sperm whale journeying with his family group across the South Seas and his views on the surrounding world, both underwater and on land. This paper tells a story of historical natural events, from the viewpoint of a fin whale that travelled, rested and stranded in the Tagus estuary mouth (Lisbon, Portugal) during the early 16th century. It allows us to move across time and explore the past of this estuarine ecosystem. What kind of changes took place and how can literature and heritage contribute to understand peoples’ constructions of past environments, local maritime histories and memories? In the second part of this essay we present a fictional short story, supported on historical documental sources and imagery research where Lily, the whale, is the main character. Thus, we see the Tagus estuary as perceived through this whale’s-eye view. Finally, we discuss past earthquakes, whale strandings, the occurrence of seals and dolphins and peoples’ perceptions of the Tagus coastal environment across time. We expect to make a contribution to the field of the marine environmental humanities. We will do so both by addressing, by means of this literary approach, the writing of “new thalassographies,” oceanic historiographies and “historicities” and by including all intervening actors—people, animals and the physical space—in the understanding of the past of more-than-human aquatic worlds. Full article