Radio New Zealand - Afternoons with Jim Mora

Here in Aotearoa, and on Afternoons in fact, we love our critters. And that passion for insects, bugs and plants is backed up by the fact that we've logged nearly three million observations on the citizen science platform iNaturalist.. The website, which has been running in New Zealand since 2012, brings together curious members of the public with expert identifiers to track populations of thousands of species. This has led to new sightings of native species, and important discoveries of invasive species. Jon Sullivan is an ecologist based at Lincoln University and is one of the founders of iNaturalist.

At this time of year, it's easy to forget that not everyone in New Zealand celebrates Christmas. Hundreds of thousands of New Zealander don't observe the religious holiday. This year, December the 25th holds special significance for the Jewish community - it's the first day of Hanukkah. Joining me now is Abby Bachhalter. Abby is part of the lay leadership team at Temple Sinai - the Progressive Jewish Congregation in Wellington.

On her recent trip in Antarctica, Claire Concannon caught up with a team of NIWA researchers who are discovering new methane seeps.
These are areas where methane gas or fluid escapes from below the seafloor through cracks or fissures.
The first active seep in Antarctica was found in 2012 at a place called Cinder Cones.
NIWA microbial ecologist Dr Sarah Seabrook visited the site in 2016 as part of her PhD research. Now she’s returning to investigate further.

Claire Concannon heads to Auckland Zoo to meet their resident tuatara.
Tuatara are pretty special, the only remaining species of reptile from an order that lived alongside the dinosaurs. And they haven’t changed much in millions of years.
University of Auckland PhD candidate Cam Hoffbeck has been investigating the tuatara gut microbiome, to see whether it is also unique.
First though, ectotherm keeper Chye-Mei Huang brings Claire inside the tuatara display enclosure to have a closer look as she feeds them some small locusts.

If you want to learn about history, culture and economics, just look at what people put between two slices of bread. Just about every cuisine around the world has a sandwich recipe going back hundreds of years and marketing consultant and former Netflix exec Barry Enderwick has tried more than a thousand of them. He makes a new, old sandwich recipe every day on his TikTok, Sandwiches of History, starting with an oyster sandwich, made with chopped raw oysters, olive oil and Worcestershire sauce. He now has thousands of followers, millions of views and a new cookbook called Sandwiches of History: The Cookbook: All the Best (and Most Surprising) Things People Have Put Between Slices of Bread.

Before spinach and silverbeet became our go-to greens, the humble puha was there. Puha or sow thistle might be an unassuming 'weed' that many of us pass without noticing, but they have been part of people's diets for millennia. Of the three species of sow thistle that grow in Aotearoa, shore puha, Sonchus kirkii, is the only endemic. It grows in coastal environments throughout the motu, but populations have steadily declined since the 1980s, and it's now listed as an at-risk species.