Five new marine reserves take effect on the Otago coast from 1 July, the biggest expansion in over a decade

A long stretch of the Otago coast is about to gain its strongest legal protection yet. From 1 July, five new marine reserves come into force along the southeast of the South Island, the first new marine reserves created anywhere in New Zealand in more than a decade and, according to the Department of Conservation, the biggest single expansion of fully protected ocean the mainland has seen in a generation.

The reserves cover 308 square kilometres, or about four percent of the Otago coastal marine area, and together they lift mainland New Zealand’s total marine reserve coverage by close to half. Inside their boundaries no fishing, dredging or extraction of any kind will be allowed. The idea is simple enough. Leave a representative slice of the coast alone, completely, and let it recover to something closer to what it once was.

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The network has been given the name Te Au Roa o Te Rakihouia, which honours the long ocean pathway travelled by Te Rakihouia, son of the early explorer Rākaihautū. Edward Ellison, Upoko of Te Rūnanga o Ōtakou, said the name “refers to the long wake or enduring ocean pathway of Te Rakihouia, son of the great explorer Rākaihautū and the first-known human to journey along and around the coastline of the South Island, conveying the enduring relationship between our people and the moana”, the sea.

What the reserves protect is a remarkable spread of habitat for such a compact area. The Department of Conservation lists estuaries and tidal lagoons, sandy beaches, rocky reefs and volcanic headlands, schist rock pools, giant kelp forests, seagrass and red algae beds, deep offshore canyons and thickets of bryozoans, the delicate lace-like animals that build reef structure on the seabed. Several of these habitats are poorly represented in the rest of New Zealand’s reserve network, which makes the Otago additions valuable out of all proportion to their size.

The wildlife reads like a roll call of the country’s rarest coastal species. The protected waters take in feeding and foraging grounds for the yellow-eyed penguin, one of the world’s rarest penguins and a bird that has been sliding towards trouble for years. They also cover habitat used by the New Zealand sea lion, the northern royal albatross and Hector’s dolphin, the small dolphin found only in New Zealand waters. Giving those animals somewhere to feed without competing against nets and pots is, in the view of conservation groups, the whole point.

Jamie Fowler of WWF New Zealand called the change game-changing for the region’s wildlife, saying the protections “will give some of our rarest and most threatened species the breathing space they desperately need”. The reserves have been a long time coming. They grew out of the South-East Marine Protection process, a planning exercise that ran for years and drew in fishers, scientists, iwi and coastal communities before any lines were finally drawn on a map.

One feature sets this network apart from almost every other reserve in the country. Day-to-day management will be shared between the Department of Conservation and Kāi Tahu, with a new team of rangers drawn from both. Aaron Fleming, the department’s operations director, said the arrangement breaks new ground. “This is new for marine reserve management in Te Waipounamu and Aotearoa. Our partnership with Kāi Tahu means we’ll share decision-making”, he said, with rangers from both partners carrying out the everyday work of patrolling and monitoring the reserves. For a coastline that Kāi Tahu have fished and travelled for centuries, the shift from being consulted to sharing the decisions is a significant one.

It has not all been smooth. A sixth reserve, Te Umukōau, was meant to be part of the package but has been held back. Its boundaries are being reconsidered after concerns raised by the Otago Rock Lobster Industry Association and a judicial review, and the Minister of Conservation will set the final lines at a later date. That delay is a reminder that closing parts of the sea to fishing, even small parts, touches real livelihoods and is rarely settled without argument.

Conservation groups, for their part, are pleased but not satisfied. Forest and Bird pointed out that the reserves still cover only four percent of the southeast coast, leaving large offshore areas open, and noted that less than one percent of New Zealand’s wider marine environment is fully protected, well short of international targets that many countries have signed up to. The Otago reserves, on that measure, are a strong start rather than a finish line.

For anyone who knows the Otago coast, the change will be felt in small, ordinary ways. A reef that has been quietly fished out may, over the years, fill back up with crayfish and pāua. Kelp forests that have thinned may thicken again. Divers and snorkellers tend to notice the difference inside a good reserve within a few seasons, and the long-running marine reserve at Leigh, north of Auckland, has shown how a protected coast can become both a nursery for fish that spill out into surrounding waters and a place people travel a long way to see.

From 1 July, the rules will be clear and the signs will go up. Whether the network grows from here, and how quickly the wildlife responds, will be worth watching closely over the coming years.

What do you think of New Zealand’s biggest marine reserve expansion in over a decade? Should more of the coast be fully protected, or have the new reserves gone far enough? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂