Until recently, it was believed that the pygmy blue whales seen in the South Taranaki Bight were just animals passing through the area. Research from a detailed, multipronged study published earlier this year instead shows these whales belong to a genetically distinct, New Zealand population. Nicola Toki, DOC’s Threatened Species Ambassador, tells us that they are making the most of a special oceanic ‘upwelling’ that supplies them with food.
Pygmy blue whale spotted off the coast of Cape Farewell.
Photo: SUPPLIED/ Leigh Torres
And here are the entries for our Critter of the Week BAKE OFF!
We'll let you know the winners next Friday
Ruth Guthrie's Mokohinau Islands Stag Beetle cake is made from chocolate cake, vanilla Swiss meringue buttercream and chocolate, it has iceplant leaves and flowers made from sugar/gumpaste
Nancy Collis made a cake of one of her favourite species a Powelliphanta, made from vanilla cake, homemade marzipan and buttercream.
Devon Nicholls made a nesting fairy tern (NZ's most endangered endemic bird)
Jasmin Hollister and her friend Alex are 11 and 12 and also made a powelliphanta cake
Jasmin and Alex's powelliphanta cake
Hazel & Evelyn's entry: kawakawa leaves, flowers, and the kawakawa looper caterpillar
Hazel & Evelyn with their entry
Madeleine Gibson's submission is the Zealandia weasel!
10 yo Mary Brown's powelliphanta cake
Alice McCullagh's Powelliphanta
Catherine Field-Dodgson & her 5 year old daughter Poppy Wilkinson made this titiwai/glow worm cake
10 year old Kate baked this short tailed bat cake
Sharyn Gibson's tuatara cake
Dakota and her Grandma Robyn Rickards created this male tree weta
Ela & Marie Gale made this Puriri moth vegan lemon cake with green candy floss and cocoa butter wings decorated with coloured icing sugar
Sophie is a critter of the week fan. She decorated her own 7th birthday cake featuring kiwi, ruru, and giant earthworm
Cicada cake by Sabine Barratt
By Robin Hodge and her two granddaughters
Jenna's long fin tuna cake
Emily Hunter's son wants to be an entymologist, so she made him this Mumu Chafer (beetle) cake for his 9th birthday
NZ Short Tailed Stingray and some Bladder Kelp by Hope Jackson, Michelle Marraffini, Rachel Hart and Lauren Roberts
A native giant slug orange cake on jelly grass and flake chocolate bark by Zana and Nico Solodi
Mark Disbury's Octopus Cake
Mandy Tocher's gecko cake
Praying mantis by Ashleigh (and Frances)
Fuligo septica also known as Dog Vomit Slime Mold by Aaron
Isobel and Dad's cutter cake. A Punga log with a weta poking out, a striped gecko and cabbage tree moth.
Sue Dela Rue and her daughter made four entries: (1) an adult kiwi
Sue Dela Rue and her daughter made four entries: (2) another adult kiwi
Sue Dela Rue and her daughter made four entries: (3) a baby kiwi
Sue Dela Rue and her daughter made four entries: (4) kakapo
11 year old Maya baked a Maui dolphin cake
Great White Shark by 9 year old Taman Mladenov
Great White Shark by 9 year old Taman Mladenov
Mary Whitehouse's endangered Kokako cake
The Royal Albatross Society made a life size Albatross cake. "We've just named it Lance after Lance Richdale, pioneer Albatross colonist 80 year anniversary of 1st chick fledge 1938"
Nicole Haerewa's Mokohinau stag beetle
Ruth Korver and Miriam Bowden's four spined Weevil cake
close up of the four spined Weevil cake
Ruth Korver's son Red and the insect cakes he made of lady bugs which aren't native but he was pretty adamant that they were his favourite insect and he wanted to make a cake of it.
Tiri Ferguson's "tiny critters on a cake"
12 year old Martina Tapia's maui dolphin cake
Peripatus/ngaokeoke by Mark @whai_i_te_hau
