Possums – those cute Aussie furballs are decimating New Zealand forests – so why don’t we just develop our fur industry and make money from the problem?

One of Colin O’Donnell’s main research interests is alpine fauna – rock wrens, wētā, other alpine invertebrates and hardy, rock-basking lizards who manage to survive above the bushline.

Scientific research often involves painstaking, meticulous measurement, sometimes repeated over a period of years before the work is completed.

Many of New Zealand’s native wildlife species are not only unique, they’re downright weird. Take our singing short-tailed bats for example.

Professor Phil Seddon is Director of Otago University’s Postgraduate Wildlife Management Programme and has been involved in species restoration programmes around the world.

It’s called the Trojan Female Technique and it’s involves a mutation in females that makes all their male offspring infertile.

Fundamental to a well-managed pest control programme is detecting what predators you have and monitoring the changes in abundance.

When a small group of Coromandel locals got together in 2000, wanting to do something for the environment, they could little have imagined the sheer scale of conservation work being done by their members today.

Robbie Van Dam from Goodnature discusses their automatic self resetting traps.

Darren Peters from the Department of Conservation discusses the DOC series of traps (150, 200 and 250).

Rest assured, New Zealand’s scientific community are beavering away to find new and better ways to combat possums.

There’s something rather special about wetlands – and not just because they’re becoming increasingly rare. There is an air of secrets and mystery, of strangeness lurking just below the waterline. There is, for example, the mudfish.

For thousands of New Zealand’s sub-Antarctic mice, their sojourn on the Antipodes is almost over. Endemic beetle and moth populations will finally get a chance to recover and nesting seabirds will be free of encroaching rodent harassment.

Habitat modification – what’s good for native wildlife and what isn’t? Wētā can thrive, living in the crevices provided by large introduced trees.

In 2010 a proposed new wastewater system got people worried in the small, remote East Coast settlement of Mahia, located on the Mahia Peninsula, between Napier and Gisborne.