Freshwater fish decline not unique to NZ



One of NZ's most endangered species, the Giant Kōkopu. Photo: Shaun Crooks



It turns out that New Zealand isn't the only country to have a rapidly declining population of freshwater fish. A study carried out in North America predicts 86 species and subspecies will go extinct by 2050. The article pins pollution as a major contributor to freshwater fish decline, an issue that is key in waterway degradation in New Zealand as well.

Read: Freshwater Fish Are Dying at Alarming Rates

Don't be discouraged by the doom and gloom predictions of this article, though, help keep our waterways and our fish stock healthy by taking simple steps like keeping rubbish and other pollutants out of streams and rivers. It may sound too simple to solve such a serious issue, but every positive effort helps.

For more information on what you can do, read: New Zealand's native freshwater fish (DOC publication)

Weta midwives



Photo: Robert Kitchin/Fairfax NZ



If you caught last Saturday's Manawatu Standard article about the baby cave weta at Te Manawa, you may have noticed that Ange and I have been coined 'weta midwives' due to our successful breeding of cave weta babies.

If you didn't catch it, read it here: Skittish cave dwellers

After reading this article, you might come away thinking "Wow, these guys don't really know much about cave weta at all". And you would be pretty much correct. Cave weta are tricky to study and little has been formally documented about this species, in addition to the difficulty with what constitutes a single species of weta in the first place. Luckily Steve Trewick and his team at Massey are on the case to try to shed more light on weta genetics, and in the meantime, we at Te Manawa will continue collecting as much info as we can on the topic of captive management and breeding.

You may interested to know that since the publishing of this article last week, we have been able to spot nine babies and the biggest babies are growing fast! It will be very exciting to track the progress of these babies as they grow and develop.

If you are visiting Te Manawa and want to spot the babies, you will need to ask a Visitor Host to point them out for you. Or, you can also catch one of us Animal Keepers every Saturday and Sunday afternoons at 3pm when we do our Public Fish Feeding.

Te Awa teaser

What do this sign,

a speckled fish

Torrentfish. Photo: Angela Fox

and a bunch of creepy crawlies have in common?

Mealworms (darkling beetle larvae). Photo: Erica Prier.

They are all new and upcoming displays in Te Awa. Stay tuned for more details about the new residents that will be moving into Te Awa over the next few months!

The fritters that never were

Shortjaw kokopu (Floppy above, Grey below). Photo: Angela Fox.

Did you know that whitebait fritters are actually made up of lots of tiny little fish that eventually grow up to be much bigger fish like those in our native tank? Those tiny little fish are called fry and they travel from the sea up our rivers and often into the net of a whitebait fisher. If they aren’t caught, those fry grow up to be a variety of fish in the Galaxias genus, but they are better known to most people as kokopu and inanga.

Giant kokopu (Scarface). Photo: Angela Fox

This giant kokopu is one of those species threatened by over-harvesting. There is increased pressure on all of the whitebait species, with four of the five species considered threatened by the Department of Conservation. Scientists like Mike Joy, a local fish expert from Massey, and anyone passionate about conservation are calling for tighter regulations around whitebait fishing in order to prevent overfishing and the possible collapse of these unique fish.

Read: Controls called for to let whitebait recover

So the next time you are picking out a treat at the fish ‘n chip shop, spare a thought for our local fish friends and order a hot dog!

Hungry, hungry mudfish



Brown mudfish. Photo: Angela Fox.



Our mudfish are masters of camouflage, can you tell there are 11 fish in our tank?? Mudfish got their name because they are often found in shallow, muddy waters such as those in swamps, shallow ponds and even drainage ditches. In the summer, these pools can dry up completely, leaving mudfish buried in the soil under roots and vegetation where they can survive out of water for 2 months or even more!

We don’t make our mudfish go through that stress. In fact, our mudfish live in very clear water so that we can share them with you. Our tank is filled with a generous amount of leaf litter, fern fronds and logs that you would normally find in waterways so that they have many places to hide and hide they do! If you have a keen eye, you might see a fin or a tail wiggling under the logs or eyes poking out from under the leaves, but the best time to see them is during our weekend public feedings.



Hand-feeding mealworms to the mudfish. Photo: Angela Fox.

Every weekend we feed our fish during public opening hours so our visitors can get a special chance to see our often elusive animals. The mudfish have been trained to feed from our hands and when they hear the top of the tank open and the water ripple, almost every fish starts to emerge from their hiding place. Sometimes they are very impatient and snap at the water’s surface to let us know they are hungry and sometimes we have to move our fingers close to the leaves to wake them up. The variable behaviour – being sometimes very active at feeding time and other times being completely uninterested – is a bit of a mystery to us, but we record behaviour every day in order to help identify what our fish like and what they don’t.

Two mudfish hiding in the leaves. Photo: Angela Fox.

Many people ask us if our fish are breeding. Unfortunately, we haven’t seen any signs of reproductive behaviour in our mudfish yet, but we also know that our fish are still relatively young. We will do our best to make sure our fish are healthy and happy and maybe one day we will spot a female with a belly full of eggs!

The elusive cave weta

Cave weta male. Photo by Erica Prier.

Yes, our cave weta are still alive! Cave weta are naturally nocturnal and like to live in dark, damp places like caves and forests. Yes - forests. Cave weta do not stay strictly in caves and may spend a good portion of their time in vegetated areas at the entrance of the caves where they are often spotted.

In fact, in our exhibit, the weta spend more time hiding in the trees and underbrush of the small planted section at one end of the enclosure than they do in the rocky cave that makes up the rest of the enclosure. When they do venture into the cave, they stay in the small crevices near the damp peat rather than on the ceiling in clusters as you often see in pictures in the wild.

One of the challenges of keeping animals in captivity is creating an enclosure that can replicate the environmental conditions that the animal experiences in the wild in order for them to display their natural behaviours. This is a much greater challenge than you may think! For example, our weta like their enclosure to be cool - about 13-14 degrees celcius - and damp - a humidity of 75-80%. How do we know? It was in this range of temperature and humidity that we saw very special behaviours such as socialisation and breeding.

However, even if we think we're doing everything, sometimes animals just don't cooperate, which means we just have more to learn! Cave weta have not been kept in captivity on a scale such as we have in Te Awa, so we can't just follow instructions in a book, we have to be scientific investigators ourselves. We have to keep asking ourselves questions like "Does the season affect the amount of activity we see in the weta?" and we have to investigate these questions so that we can keep making the necessary changes to our enclosure so that visitors get the most worthwhile experience.

So even if you don't spot one of our handsome weta, know that behind the scenes we are working hard to learn more about these elusive insects and bring more knowledge to our visitors and the scientific community.

Happy one year anniversary, Te Awa!

Common Bully Female. By Angela Fox.

A year ago, Te Manawa’s exhibition about the Manawatu River opened and this exhibition was the first of its kind at this institution because it incorporates live animals, or as we like to call them – live exhibits! We keepers have learned a lot since taking on the daily care of cave weta, tree frogs, and several types of native fish – some of the knowledge was passed down from our expert consultants, but most was on the job learning. Possibly our most successful component is the large 5000 litre native fish tank, where we have nearly every aquatic resident that started off the exhibition last year as well as several recent additions that have happily integrated into the tank.

We would like to kick our blogging into first gear now in order to share what we’ve learned about our animals in the past year, provide more information about the animals on display, and give an up close view of what it’s like to be an Animal Keeper at Te Manawa. Please feel free to post any questions you might have so that we can look at answering them in upcoming posts.

Happy reading!