The Guardian: ‘We used to be leaders’: the collapse of New Zealand’s landmark ocean park
Two decades since its creation the Hauraki Gulf Marine Park is overfished and overrun with sea urchins. Community groups are calling for urgent action to save the once abundant habitat.
Tiritiri Matangi is one of the jewels of New Zealand’s Hauraki Gulf. For the past 35 years the island, which is within sight of Auckland’s skyscrapers, has been a protected nature reserve.
Step ashore and you’re enveloped in birdsong: kiwi and takahē thrive here, and vegetation envelops the cliffs to the sea. But beneath the waves it’s a different story.
“It was solid kelp forest, beautiful ecklonia, crayfish bristling out of every crevice,” marine biologist Roger Grace, who started diving here in the early 1960s, told me shortly before he died last year.