Conservation Minister Tama Potaka has committed $2 million over two years to the Whangamarino wetland in north Waikato and another $75,000 to a captive breeding programme for one of the heaviest insects in the world. Both payments come out of the levy charged to international visitors, and both were announced in the Waikato on Friday.
Whangamarino covers roughly 7,000 hectares of swamps, fens and peat bogs around the Whangamarino and Maramarua rivers, south of the Bombay Hills. It has been recognised as a wetland of international importance under the Ramsar Convention since 1989, one of only seven New Zealand sites with that status.
“We are serious about protecting and restoring New Zealand’s taonga sites and taonga species now, and for future generations,” Potaka said in the announcement, using the word for treasured things.
“This is why we are committing $2 million over two years to kickstart work on the Whangamarino Action Plan and help restore the habitat as a Wetland of International Importance.”
Potaka said the wetland was under significant pressure from a history of drainage and frequent flooding. Working with iwi and other groups, the aim is to improve the way water levels are managed for both biodiversity and water quality, while recognising the part the wetland plays in soaking up floodwater. The money will also go towards infrastructure to hold water at the right levels and to cut the numbers of pest koi carp.
The funding follows a blunt assessment published in February. The Department of Conservation, Waikato Regional Council and Waikato Tainui produced the first New Zealand report to combine science with mātauranga Māori, the knowledge held by iwi, in order to measure how much a Ramsar wetland had changed. Countries that sign the convention are required to notify it when the ecological character of a listed wetland has shifted. The report concluded that Whangamarino had deteriorated since it was listed in 1989.
“Whangamarino has faced mounting pressures for decades, but recent events have made things worse,” DOC regional director Tinaka Mearns said in February. Poor water quality killed fish and birds in 2022 and 2023 after floods washed contaminants in, oxygen levels crashed and botulism broke out. A fire started by people in October 2024 was another setback.
The report found declines in water quality, in the amount of native wetland habitat, in the population of Australasian bittern, and in the cultural values recognised by mana whenua. Whangamarino holds about 20 percent of the national breeding population of the bittern, a secretive brown heron that booms rather than calls. It also supports the black mudfish, which survives dry summers by burrowing into mud, along with 18 native fish species and the swamp helmet orchid, which grows nowhere else on earth.
Marae Tukere, general manager of Oranga at Waikato Tainui, said the findings matched what people on the ground had been seeing for a long time. “This report confirms what our people have been observing over many years,” Tukere said, adding that restoration had to address the whole system rather than individual symptoms.
Waikato Regional Council environmental science manager Dr Mike Scarsbrook warned that nobody should expect a quick fix. “It’s taken a long time for Whangamarino and Lake Waikare to degrade, so it will take a long time for it to recover,” Scarsbrook said. “Success of the action plan depends on sustained collaboration, investment and accountability, no single intervention will solve the problem.”
The council is leading the action plan the new money is meant to start, working with DOC, Waikato Tainui, the Waikato River Authority, mana whenua representatives, Fish and Game and landowners. It covers neighbouring Lake Waikare as well.
The much smaller grant goes to an animal most New Zealanders would rather not find in the woodshed. The Māhoenui giant wētā is rated Threatened, Nationally Critical. Females weigh 20 to 25 grams, about the same as a mouse, and males run a little lighter. The species was found in the 1960s in a remnant patch of tawa forest at Māhoenui in the King Country, and takes its name from the place. It was later found somewhere far less obvious.
“What was an accident of a piece of hill country that had some goats in it, some gorse left to go wild, these wētā moved in and because gorse was so dense and they could hide in it and it meant the rats and the mice couldn’t climb in and eat them,” DOC technical advisory group leader Amanda Haigh told RNZ last November. “It created this little haven for them.”
That accidental refuge has been closing. Goat browsing kept the gorse open and prickly, and as native forest has grown back through it the wētā have lost cover. DOC says they are nine times more likely to be killed by predators in regenerating native forest than in browsed gorse.
“What has been happening in about the last 10 years is we’ve had a massive decline in the population and the habitat is changing and the predators are starting to take hold, so what we’ve been doing is starting to do translocations to get new populations established in other places and spread the risk,” Haigh said.
That is where Otorohanga Kiwi House comes in. Working with Te Whare o Mōkau ki Runga, part of Ngāti Maniapoto, the centre has bred more than 300 of the wētā in captivity since 2021, the first sustained success since the 1990s. About 100 of them were released into the predator fenced Rotokare Scenic Reserve in Taranaki last November, the first of several planned releases there.
“When we first started the conversation there were so few individuals in the Waikato reserve itself that a wild to wild translocation didn’t really seem feasible,” Rotokare conservation manager Fiona Gordon told RNZ.
Landcare Research scientist Corinne Watts, who handled the four largest wētā at that release, said the insects are calmer than their reputation suggests. “They are not going to try and jump too much because something that big could really hurt themselves, so I just think of them as gentle giants really,” she said. Watts said she had never been bitten by one.
Potaka picked up the same theme. “They’re one of the heaviest and toughest insect species in the world, but also one of the most endangered,” the minister said. “Otorohanga Kiwi House has been doing fantastic work to breed giant wētā for release. With this IVL support, and what will hopefully be a successful breeding season, we hope to see more wētā in the wild.”
Both grants come from the International Visitor Conservation and Tourism Levy, which most overseas visitors pay when they apply to enter the country. The charge went from $35 to $100 on 1 October 2024, and the money is split between conservation work and tourism infrastructure.
Have you spent time at Whangamarino, or seen a giant wētā in the wild? Tell us 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 🙂
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