By Bob Zuur
WWF-New Zealand Marine Advocate
It rains 325 days per year on Campbell Island. Yesterday was one of the 40 when it doesn't rain, but today it did. Not a proper West Coast deluge, but a persistent, saturating drizzle.
Thankfully, the showers were to be infrequent, but the track was always damp, often sodden, and occasionally boggy with mud almost to our knees.
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Bob Zuur is a marine biologist who is spending a month exploring Antarctica and the sub-Antarctic Islands to raise awareness of the area and its importance. His current work with WWF focuses on fisheries, offshore oil exploration and seabed mining, and on increasing protected areas in our marine environment. He will be documenting his travels here on 3news.co.nz.
Our Far South Bob Zuur RSS Feed
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Sooty albatrosses and a dramatic vista greeted us from the cliffs above Northwest Bay. To the north, the cliffs receded into the mist. To the west, Dent Island thrust up like a shark's tooth - it was misnamed from the French "dente".
It's hard to imagine that the entire population of Campbell Island teal (a small duck) took refuge from the pests on the main island until it was rediscovered in 1975. The teal have since been reintroduced to the main island once the rats were eradicated.
To the southwest, the sandy beaches of Northwest Bay beckoned. Yet it was here that the heroic actions of DOC and MetService staff saved the life of a colleague attacked by a shark in 1992.
We crawled through wiry grass tree (Dracophyllum) scrub down to the beach. Much of the beach was already occupied by sea lions, while an elephant seal with a radio transmitter on his head stooged along about 50m from the beach. The transmitter would provide information on its movements.
The sea lions painted a pleasant scene, interrupted by only occasional threats from the beachmaster bull sea lions towards aspiring heirs to his throne.
Indeed, the tale of sea lions at Campbell Islands is a rather happy one, where numbers appear to be increasing. This contrasts with the situation on the Auckland Islands, which we visited over three weeks ago. Here the number of pups born has halved in the last decade or so.
University of Otago and DOC scientists compared the reasons why one population should
decline, while the other increased. Possible reasons included non-human factors such as predation, disease and environmental change, and human factors such as pollution, deaths in trawling nets and competition for food with fishing trawlers. They concluded that commercial fishing was the most likely cause for the decline.
Back at the beach from where the Zodiacs would pick us up, a female sea lion sauntered over for a bit of sport. For some reason, she picked on me.
Following Anton van Helden's advice (he's the marine mammal expert at Te Papa and so should know), I held my ground and refused to play her game. Clearly disappointed, the sea lion ambled off.
But it is the sea lions that are really threatened, not me. It's time we addressed the serious decline in their numbers.
source: newshub archive
