17 Aug 2015

Off the beaten track with Kennedy Warne

From Nine To Noon, 11:45 am on 17 August 2015

By Kennedy Warne

Whitebait in egg.

Whitebait Photo: Kennedy Warne

The official start of spring is another month away, but with daffodils, jonquils, paper whites and early cheer tossing their heads in sprightly dance in my garden, it feels like the season is here. The other morning I watched a song thrush on the lawn gathering nesting material and doing a little jiggy dance. It won’t be long till pipiwharauroa, the shining cuckoo, arrives back from its winter holiday in the tropics.

Of course, nothing says spring like the start of the whitebait season a couple of days ago. But it took freshwater ecologist Mike Joy to make a startling connection between whitebait and another native species that has been in the news in a culinary connection: kereru. New Zealanders are eating threatened species—whitebait—and they can buy it from the supermarket.

We have 54 native freshwater fish. Three quarters of them are threatened species. 20 years ago, less than one quarter were threatened. Four of the five main whitebait species are classified by DoC as “at risk, populations declining.” “We’re frittering away out whitebait,” says Jane Goodman, DoC’s freshwater technical advisor. The main causes of decline are water abstraction, irrigation, habitat loss—and trout.

And here’s where it gets interesting: think of all the money and effort we putting into controlling and eradicating rats, stoats, weasels, feral cats—the predators of our unique and threatened land creatures. Yet we give the “weasel of the waterways” a pass. We understand that our endemic terrestrial species can’t cope with predation pressure from introduced mammals, but don’t often make the connection that our endemic freshwater species are also facing unsustainable predation pressure from introduced fish.

Whitebaiter on the Arawhata River, South Westland.

Whitebaiter on the Arawhata River, South Westland. Photo: Kennedy Warne

Joy says that a first step in shoring up our declining galaxiid (whitebait) species would be to ban commercial whitebaiting and make the whitebait catch recreational only (as it is with trout. “If you gave our native fish the same protection that we give to our trout, there would be a huge improvement,” he says.

Protection of native fish would also benefit other species, including one which depends utterly on a fish called the koaro to survive. That species is the kakahi or kaeo, the freshwater mussel. Kakahi have a long and close connection with Māori. They were valuable kai, the juice was a food for infants and a medicine, and the shells were used for everything from vegetable scrapers and hair cutters to rattles on kites. A colourful whakatauki invokes the mussel like this: “The husband who diligently dredges for mussels will enjoy his wife’s affections while the husband who lazes around the house will have his head thumped!”

Whitebaiter on the Arawhata River, South Westland.

Whitebaiter on the Arawhata River, South Westland. Photo: Kennedy Warne

Like most other freshwater species, kaeo is in decline. Part of the reason for kaeo’s decline in the wild is its recondite reproductive habits. All river-dwelling molluscs face a significant life-history challenge: how to avoid having one’s eggs and larvae swept out to sea by the current. Kaeo overcome this problem by producing larvae that hitch a ride upriver with fish—specifically the native freshwater galaxiid known as koaro.

Larval kaeo latch on to the gills of a passing koaro and live there, obtaining both transport and nutrients until they are large enough to hop off and take up a sedentary life on the riverbed. The decline of galaxiid populations through nutrient overload and other environmental problems in waterways has cost the molluscs their host, and kaeo numbers have dwindled accordingly.

Kentucky farmer–poet Wendell Berry said “We must make our lives fit our places”—and I would add, “We must also make our lives fit our species.” Some of those species are freshwater fish. Whitebait are as much our biological treasures as kiwi and kakapo, and we need to be their guardians.

To do so, we could derive some inspiration from Amazonian tribes with their profound sense of connection to the natural world. A film in the current film festival, doing the rounds of New Zealand centres at the moment, offers some beautiful insights into the Amazonian way.

Embrace of the Serpent” focuses on the life of the Karamakate, Mover of Worlds. The movie is based on actual trips in the Amazon made by two explorers, German ethnographer Theodor Koch-Grunberg, who visited the Pemon Indians of North-West Brazil in 1911, and American scientist Richard Evans Schultes, who followed in his footsteps with Koch-Grunberg’s journals for a guide, three decades later.

There is much trenchant comparison between the rich inner lives of the Cohiuano and the venal superficiality of the Europeans who come into their midst. Karamakate says: “I had a dream once, of a white spirit who did not know how to dream. He was sick, and the only way he could heal was by learning to dream.”

Yet even the “mover of worlds” can find himself bereft of connection to the sustaining world. At one powerful moment in the film, Karamakate is drawing on a rock face above a river. The explorer Schultes asks him what he’s doing, and he admits that he is no longer hearing the voice of the creatures he paints. “Animals, plants, rocks—they all went silent. The line is broken. I am empty. How could I forget the gifts the gods have given us? Now [these drawings] are just pictures on rocks.”

At another point, Karamakate explains that, before he can become a warrior, every Cohiuano man has to leave everything behind and go into the jungle, guided only by his dreams. In that journey he has to discover, completely alone, who he really is. Some get lost and never come back. But those that do are ready to face whatever may come.

Speaking of facing whatever may come, I have been inspired by the story of Kimberley Chambers, who just made history by being the first woman to swim almost 50 km in the open ocean from the Farallon Islands to Golden Gate Bridge, taking 17 hours. She adds this to a long list of marathon swims she has been making since 2012. She is only the sixth person to complete the Oceans Seven—seven long-distance open-water swims that are considered the marathon swimming equivalent of the Seven Summits mountaineering challenge. They include the channel between Scotland and Ireland (where, in the course of her swim, Chambers was stung 200 times by lion’s mane jellyfish), Cook Strait, the channel between Maui and Molokai, the English Channel, the Catalina Channel (LA/Channel Islands), the Tsugaru Strait (Honshu/Hokkaido) and the Strait of Gibraltar.

The story of how she got into marathon swimming is remarkable. Raised on a farm in the King Country, she was a ballerina for most of her childhood and teenage years. She became a software designer at Adobe Systems in San Francisco, but in 2009 had a bad fall down a staircase. She almost lost a leg to internal swelling, and it took her two years to learn to walk again. She decided to start swimming as a way of building strength and finding a new discipline in which to excel, and was soon doing 80 lengths of the pool each training session. Today, she says, she gets up every morning at 4.15 to swim in a pool for 1.5 hours, then swims in San Francisco Bay. She says one of the reasons she enjoys the sport of marathon swimming is that there is “no gold medal, no cash prize, you’re competing with your mind.” In addition, she speaks of the “sacredness of swimming,” the sense of connection to the ocean world, of being immersed in the sea every day.

I am reminded of the lines of e. e. cummings:

for whatever we lose (like a you or me)

it’s always ourselves we find in the sea

Listen to Kennedy's interview with Kathryn Ryan.