To sustain the environment of the Whangateau harbour and its catchment
Last updated 09:52, June 28 2017
Fish life around the Rena remains during salvage operations. – Darryl Torckler
An attempt to save the marine life that flourished on Astrolabe Reef off Tauranga after the Rena was wrecked could now mean councils have more say on the way coastal areas, including fisheries, are managed. [Read more…]
Whangateau HarbourCare Group has since 2009 had plans for a Scientific Reserve in the southern arm of the harbour (Waikokopu Creek), extending the existing Omaha Taniko Wetlands Scientific Reserve (kahikatea forest) down to the low tide mark. The area is a rich mosaic of saltmarsh, mangroves, seagrass, firm sand flats and rare coralline turf “rhodolith” balls. Concept of Scientific Reserve rather than Marine Reserve is to allow future manipulation of small mangroves if they spread to compromise the open sand flats valuable to wading birds in the area. [Read more…]
This requires urgent attention and submissions from lots of people because it is possible the exclusion zone may be lifted as soon as 11th February thus opening up the area to fishing after more than 4 years recovery from 100 years of too much fishing! The local maori want to keep the area closed to fishing. What a waste that would be, squandering 4 years of recovery for a few greedy weeks of fishing.
Our mussel reef restoration project is increasing biodiversity and clearing the waters of the Hauraki Gulf in New Zealand
A marine reserve for Te Muri?
Our Regional Parks are places where people expect to have an enjoyable recreational experience and to engage with the wonders of the natural world. A lot of effort is put in to restore forest and wetland habitats, and to encourage birds and other wildlife back into our Regional Parks. Unfortunately in the sea fishing is responsible for serious loss of abundance and diversity of life, and some would say fishing is an inappropriate activity adjacent to our Regional Parks. A Marine Reserve has been suggested for the sea adjacent to the new Te Muri Regional Park. I want to put this idea into a national and regional context.
The following document is intended as a first draft to kick off a discussion of a network of marine protected areas for the Hauraki Gulf. It was prepared late in 2014 for the Biodiversity and Biosecurity Round Table of the Marine Spatial Planning process, but there was little time for discussion within the group. It was sent on to the Stakeholder Working Group for further discussion.
The draft network follows the established principles for a network of MPAs as further discussed in the document
SEASKETCH DRAFT MPAs NETWORK, SITE DESCRIPTIONS. 12 Dec 2014 update Roger Grace. For consideration by the Biodiversity and Biosecurity Round Table of the Marine Spatial Planning process for the HGMP.
Draft Type 1 MPA network for the Hauraki Gulf Marine Park.
The humble grey mullet may have been an important vector in transporting sediment through our estuaries. They were in huge abundance 100 years or so ago, but now are present in just a shadow of their former numbers.
When grey mullet were in huge numbers they would have been an important vector in transporting sediment through our estuaries, by swallowing mud in the upper estuary and releasing it near the estuary mouth. Unfortunately there are so few left that this service is no longer effective
There are historic photos of clinker dinghies in the Kaipara Harbour, loaded to overflowing with mullet, many huge by todays standards and upwards of 70 cm long.
In my youth I saw a few schools of grey mullet while snorkeling, but then they “disappeared from the face of the earth”. Only in the last eight or so years have they been starting to come back, and I now frequently see adult grey mullet in the mangroves of Whangateau, and juveniles are seen in the lower reaches of the Brick Bay stream. A couple of years ago I saw a school of around 200 grey mullet, swirling around like a school of kahawai, in the Whangateau 100 metres or so below the Ti Point wharf.
John Booth
3 February 2015
Today, the reef off Te Akeake, the northwest extremity of Urupukapuka Island, displays a fringe of kelp at low tide level, and then again from about 8 metres depth. What you can’t quite make out are the thousands of puny kina busy rasping their way across the intervening area. (Photos: NZ Aerial Mapping; Salt Air)
Sea urchins (kina) have eaten out much of the shallow-water kelp of the Bay of Islands, defiling the Bay’s essential life force. There appears no other credible explanation for the kelp loss. Similar destruction has taken place in many other parts of New Zealand, as well as overseas. The experience is that sea urchins increase in abundance as their key predators become overfished; the sea urchins consume or destroy the kelp over the band of the urchins’ depth distribution; and this leads to the collapse of natural functioning of shallow-water reef ecosystems.
Marine reserves in New Zealand and elsewhere show that when fishing pressure on the predators of sea urchins is removed, the full canopy of kelp returns. No-take reserves lead to fully functioning kelp ecosystems—their dependent life forms and ecological processes re-established.
The imposition has been so great it will take decades to repair. But the sea’s mauri can be restored. [Read more…]
Whangateau Harbour in flood January 29, 2011
This is the submission by Dr Roger Grace to the Independent Hearings Panel in the matter of the Proposed Auckland Unitary Plan on behalf of the Environmental Defense Society and the Royal Forest and Bird Protection Society of New Zealand [Read more…]
In New Zealand, when we talk of no-take zones in the sea we really mean marine reserves, set up under the Marine Reserves Act 1971. Although there are a few other ways of achieving full protection, the Marine Reserves Act is the specific piece of legislation designed for this purpose. It does have some short-comings, however, and to correct some of these a new Marine Reserves Bill has been prepared, but has been languishing in the storage cupboards of Parliament with no action for more than ten years. [Read more…]
Whangateau Harbourcare 