Coasts

Dr. Michelle Kelly of NIWA and Dr. Paco Cárdenas of Uppsala University, have just published a paper describing an amazing sponge which was found on a NIWA cruise to the Colville Ridge, north-east of New Zealand.

Anyone can participate, and all you need is access to the sea, a smartphone or a camera and computer.

Like other members of the family Asteriidae, Allostichaster is fissiparous.

The Cidaroida is an order of very spiky and robust regular sea urchins, which can resemble something like a sputnik satellite or an underwater mine to the uninitiated.

Geodia ewok Sim-Smith & Kelly, 2015 is an astrophorid sponge from the family Geodiidae. It was described, along with 16 other new species, in a recent publication by Sim-Smith & Kelly (2015) which increased the number of described New Zealand Geodiidae fauna from four to 22!

The gregarious squat lobster is commonly found in shallow coastal waters along the eastern coast of New Zealand’s South Island

Taxonomy is one of New Zealand’s most important sciences but its impact is often not widely known nor understood.

Solanderia Duchassaing & Michelin, 1846, which is commonly known as the tree hydroid or sea fan hydroid, is a genus of athecate hydrozoan.

Brisingida are an order of deep-sea dwelling sea stars that look more like brittle stars with a small disk that is distinctly set off from their 13-15 arms.

This fan-shaped beauty is large and solitary, with a widespread distribution throughout New Zealand and mainly lives on soft substrate in a broad range of depths (0 – 3200 metres).

Corallimorpharia are a group of cnidarians morphologically intermediate between sea anemones and stony corals. Like sea anemones (Actiniaria), they lack a calcareous skeleton but their internal anatomy and nematocysts are similar to stony corals (Scleractinia). In fact, phylogenetic studies have shown that Scleractinia and Corallimorpharia are closely related.

NIWA scientists scan Lake Tekapo with the aim of finding out if submarine landslides can create a tsunami hazard for the Lake Tekapo township and hydropower infrastructure.