Coasts

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.

The main breeding population of NZ sea lions at the Auckland Islands has declined by approximately 50% since the late 1990s.

Ophiactis abyssicola (Sars, 1861) is a very common deep sea species of brittlestar distributed throughout New Zealand waters and in temperate regions in the Pacific, Indian, and Atlantic Oceans.

Gibberula ficula (Murdoch & Suter, 1906) are micro snails in the family Cystiscidae.

A NIWA-led project to tackle coastal acidification in New Zealand.

Scientists are taking some high-tech equipment to Fiordland next week to find out more about what happens when a river meets the ocean.

Amphinome rostrata (Pallas, 1766), in the polychaete family Amphinomidae, can be found living amongst goose barnacles (species of Lepas) on drift objects in tropical oceans worldwide.

Work to protect New Zealand waters from an increasing number of invasive biological pests has received a funding boost to fight their spread.

Estuaries and coasts provide a wide range of benefits to New Zealanders – “ecosystem services”. However, we still don’t know enough about these ecosystem services – a challenge NIWA and other scientists are tackling with a new technique.