-SMcM_0.jpg "Alex (left) and Colin (right) surveying one of their long-term plant plots")
Alex Fergus is giving a talk for the botanical society of Otago about the dramatic vegetation changes over the last 200 years of human occupation of Campbell Island.
The talk is on the 10th August 2011. Find out more at:
http://www.botany.otago.ac.nz/bso/...
-SMcM.jpg "Alex and Carla clearing the nets one last time.")
-SMcM.jpg "The cutting down of the nets begins.")
-SMcM.jpg "The nets are lovingly folded for storage (in the rubbish bin).")
-SMcM.jpg "A special moment deserving of a special wine – Mountford’s 2008 Chardonnay.")
-SMcM.jpg "Cheers to the nets and the end of 60 days of sampling.")
60 days of snow, rain, hail and gale has pelted the six 3 metre long insect nets that I installed with Steve C., Carla and Jo’s help just south of the base after our arrival. Against the demons of weather, the nets have stood strong, no doubt due to the clever hand of the net constructor, my Ma, and her sewing machine.
For 2 months I have daily cleared the amassed invertebrate treasure, often with Carla’s assistance, and with Carla and Mark covering for me when I have...
Many of the historic sites that were easily seen in 1981 are now obscured by scrub and other vegetation. I have included two images here that show the rate of vegetative growth on Campbell Island over the last 30 years.
The first image is one I took on my 1981 visit to the island. It shows posts and a central pole of what may have been a small tent camp from the early farming era beginning 1895 – a site now known as the ‘Bivvy’. In the middle distance are two...
Unfortunately, in spite of our best efforts, we will leave the island without complete datasets ...
[Carla Meurk]
There are many things that draw people to studying and exploring nature. Just being able to experience the miracle of life in the course of your work is a great privilege – even if most of the time you are desk-bound and enveloped in the tedium of writing grant applications. Anyway, I digress. This is about those moments of personal and scientific discovery – finding something never known before. These can be grandiose theories and principles; but I get a thrill out of much...
Early botanists exploring Campbell Island were astounded by the lush herbaceous plants that they called megaherbs. Megaherbs encompass a diverse array of plants including Bulbinella, Stilbocarpa, and Anisotome, but the large showy daisies in the genus Pleurophyllum are arguably the most striking. Three species are included in the genus, which is endemic to the subantarctic islands. All three are found on Campbell Island. They hybridize in various combinations, which suggests reproductive...
With nearly 50 species, New Zealand is the centre of diversity for the genus Dracophyllum. Dracophyllum longifolium ranges widely on the mainland of New Zealand, but is also found on Stewart, Auckland and Campbell Islands, whereas D. scoparium has a perplexing distribution being found both on the Chatham Islands and Campbell Island, but not on the mainland.
At low elevations on Campbell Island they form almost impenetrable dwarf forests, which can reach up to 5 meters high, but...
Most plants perished from Antarctica as global temperatures cooled and the ice sheets advanced. Cushion plants and mosses were among the last plants to perish. Although the precise stratigraphical sequence and dates are controversial, fossil remains suggest that they may have persisted until the Pliocene Epoch about ten million years ago.
Cushion plants form expansive communities on Campbell Island. It is conceivable these plants are the descendants of Antarctic tundra vegetation....
A number of exotic plants have become established and persist on Campbell Island. They are mostly associated with homestead or campsites or along tracks. The most common are range grasses such as Poa pratensis, Kentucky bluegrass, Festuca rubra, red fescue, or Anthoxxanthum odoratum, sweet vernal grass. A few such as Cerastium fontanum are found in coastal habitats at the high tide line or tussock or megaherb communites. They are mostly perennial herbs or grasses with seeds or fruits that...
One of the simplest and most effective ways of visualising and evaluating change in vegetation is to go back to where historic photos were taken and take the exact same shot. It is amazing to see history happen in front of your eyes. We are fortunate in having many old photographs taken around Campbell Island going back as far as the 1880s – before there was much human-caused change in the vegetation. This is a bit of a base line.
As an example (I will provide some better...
It is widely accepted that sympatric speciation occurs, but it has rarely been demonstrated and the process is not well understood; allopatric speciation (reproductive isolation by distance) being a more common mode of evolution. Island ecosystems provide a perfect venue to test these evolutionary phenomena.
Two species of Abrotanella are found on Campbell Island. Abrotanella spathulata is the more...
Well not wrangle the Rockhopper's, but I am off to monitor chick survival. It’s been 6 years since I was at Penguin Bay, and the photos here date from then. In that short time it’s likely the population of Pengs has continued to decline, an ongoing trend since the 1940s.
I’m heading over to the Bay, about a 6 hour tramp across the heart of Campbell Island, to help out Kyle Morrison, a Canadian PhD student studying Rockhopper Penguin decline as part of a NIWA...
On Dec 24 Mark Crompton and I set out on a botanical expedition to the saddle between Mt Azimuth and Mt Fizeau. These two peaks roughly bisect Campbell Island and offer outstanding views to the north and south. As the albatross glides it is only about three kilometres to the saddle, but the track winds through dwarf Dracophyllum forest, boggy tussocks, megaherbs and alpine tundra fellfields near the saddle.
Mark is a fine companion; I’d trust him with my life. He walks at a...
What am I doing down here – 41 years since I first set foot on Campbell Island? I originally came down as a callow youth to set up a vegetation monitoring programme for recording the way plants responded to the eradication of sheep. This was carried out progressively between 1970 (northern part of Island), 1984 (all but southeastern tip of Island) and early 1990s when the last one was removed.
We are going back to check all those plots, transect lines and photo points (...
Rats like to gobble creepy crawly things (insects). But which ones do they like to gobble the most? And of those favourites, have any endured down here on Campbell Island? It’s now almost a decade since the furry devils were eradicated from the island, so no longer are things like the giant weevils and the local weta subject to regular chompings.
This series of nets is a replica of an experiment run in 1960; by comparing records from then to now I can see which insects have...
The Sitka Spruce planted in Camp Cove by Lord Ranfurly early last century has been erroneously reported as the southernmost tree in New Zealand. Of course trees go further south in Patagonia, but there are trees here already – it’s all a matter of definition.
Trees have been described as woody plants with a single trunk and canopy of foliage, a woody plant over 5 m tall and other height limits. The native heath trees on Campbell Island (2 species of Dracophyllum or...
.jpg "It would be interesting to know whether our nets are used more for warding off sea lions than actually sampling. Alex James is doing a top job in gently suggesting to this very curious sea lion (via the kick net) that the pack is off-limits. It wouldn’t do for a sea lion to have off with our samples. And at least this one looks a decent size – unlike the cute female that had Carla and Alex F bailed up…")
.jpg "And finally, Shelley is there to make sure the rocks are scrubbed clean (we can’t have dirty rocks now), with the kick net downstream to catch all those tiny chironomids and blackflies (like the ‘sandflies’ that abound on the West Coast of NZ) that live on the rocks in the fast-flowing water.")
Campbell Island is not really the place for fishnet stockings but nets are in this season. We know there are nets out across the oceans, possibly harming the fish stocks that the penguins and albatrosses dine out on. But here on the Bicentennial Expedition to Campbell there are smaller fish to fry – and some bigger!
The next thing I saw these heroic freshwater biologists doing was scrubbing the rocks for algae-inhabiting insects and crustaceans and then measuring the rocks;...
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