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ScienceAugust 16, 2019

Weed is going out of fashion and Māori kids are leading the way

Contributing writer
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Research shows young New Zealanders are stubbing out cannabis – and Māori more than most.

Research released today shows kids are smoking less and less weed, with Māori and Pasifika in particular increasingly choosing to abstain. 

Academics from the University of Otago, University of Auckland, and Victoria University of Wellington cross-analysed three National Youth Health and Wellbeing studies conducted from 2001 to 2012 which tracked substance use and risky behaviours in children. Their analysis found lifetime cannabis use in secondary school students fell from 38% to 23% in that period, and the number of youth who used cannabis weekly or more halved from 6.7% to 3.2%.

Researcher Joseph Boden, associate professor of psychological medicine at the University of Otago, said the findings were welcome, particularly given the decline was most prevalent in communities who have historically suffered disproportionate harm from substance abuse.

“What’s heartening is the differentials by ethnicity are closing, so actually young Māori and Pasifika are using cannabis even less. They’re stopping at a rate much quicker than Pākehā. It’s really heartening. And more recent data around alcohol and cigarettes, and all the other indices, shows it’s probably continuing past where the data on cannabis ends in 2012.”

Boden said the use of psychoactive substances as a whole declined over the same period, meaning the falling rates of cannabis use couldn’t be explained by a migration to other drugs instead. Nor could the decline be fully attributed to public education campaigns or the work done in schools around the country, Boden said.

“I’d love if the public health people could take credit for it, but I don’t see any reason to assume that we should. There’s never been good evidence for education campaigns or anything like that, and we’re not doing anything radically different in terms of our alcohol and drug education, so I really say it’s down to the young people themselves who are living their lives differently than previous generations did.”

Smoking, binge drinking and drug use overall decreased in the same period, the researchers found. While shifting behaviour in the way young people associate could be one contributing factor, Boden said a resurgence of te ao Māori and Māoritanga could also have an effect, citing the findings of the Christchurch Health and Development Study.

“What we’ve found during the CHDS is that people who are more culturally literate and participate more in their culture are less likely to engage in risky behaviour. I think there’s a good reinforcing benefit of the increasing knowledge of their own culture.” 

Boden said the decline showed that potential legalisation wouldn’t necessarily lead to the increased rates of youth usage that some predict. However it also meant that intense scrutiny would be needed in the development of any potential recreational industry in order to prevent corporate interests from reversing a positive trend.

“We don’t want to create a situation with a legal framework that is going to encourage use. In other words, it’s got to be the right price, it’s got to be a safe product and we really don’t want any advertising or big corporate influence trying to get people using,” he said.

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“Given the evidence that cannabis use, and by extension cannabis-related harm, is on the decline for young people, it is of even greater importance that the laws and policies developed do not reverse this trend, and do not lead to increased use and harm among this group.”

The findings are also likely to inform a summary of the evidence for the harms and benefits of legalised cannabis set to be released by the prime minister’s chief science adviser ahead of next year’s referendum.

Professor Juliet Gerrard, with assistance from a panel of New Zealand researchers and academics, will draw from longitudinal studies like the CHDS and a wealth of international data from areas where cannabis has been legalised and decriminalised. The report will be audited by international researchers and released to the public in January next year.

Keep going!
An artist’s impression of an artist’s impression of the giant parrot. Image not to scale. (Dr Brian Choo, Flinders University and Tina Tiller)
An artist’s impression of an artist’s impression of the giant parrot. Image not to scale. (Dr Brian Choo, Flinders University and Tina Tiller)

ScienceAugust 7, 2019

Discovered: the massive AF parrots that once roamed New Zealand

Staff Writer
An artist’s impression of an artist’s impression of the giant parrot. Image not to scale. (Dr Brian Choo, Flinders University and Tina Tiller)
An artist’s impression of an artist’s impression of the giant parrot. Image not to scale. (Dr Brian Choo, Flinders University and Tina Tiller)

The world’s largest parrot, standing up to a metre tall with a beak that could crack most food sources, used to live in New Zealand, paleontologists have revealed after a breakthrough fossil find.

If you think kea having a crack at your wing mirrors are scary, imagine how much more we’d fear native parrots if they were a metre tall. 

That might be a reality on the streets of New Zealand today, had a newly discovered giant parrot not gone extinct millions of years ago. Scientists have uncovered fossils of the big bird in a site near St Bathans in central Otago, not a long way away from another site of paleontological significance at Foulden Maar.  

Named Heracles inexpectatus, the bird is the largest parrot ever discovered, longer than the native kākāpo, and much heavier than the Hyacinth macaw from South America. It was given the name because like mythical Greek hero Hercules, this parrot would have been an absolutely massive unit. 

The fossil was discovered by a team of expert Australian and New Zealand palaeontologists, and is considered by Canterbury Museum’s senior curator of natural history Paul Scofield as an “exciting surprise”, even for such a fossil-rich site like St Bathans.

“It’s the gift that keeps on giving. It keeps producing amazing finds, and this is among the most amazing we’ve found here,” he told The Spinoff.

Much of what we know about this parrot can only be speculated about, given it lived in the early miocene era about 19 million years ago. However, the speculation of Flinders University associate professor Trevor Worthy is more informed than most. He said it would have been omnivorous, primarily finding its food on the forest floor, and highly competitive in the wider ecosystem. 

“Our main premise is that it occupied the niche on the ground that is eating the fruit and seeds coming off the abundant trees at the time,” he said.

“On an island, there’s normally only one large bird that does this. On the Mascarene Islands, it became the dodo.”

“So whatever gets in and takes that role, on a small island, usually becomes the only one. New Zealand is different because it’s bigger, and has a more diverse set of habitats. So it did have moa and its ancestors, and it did have the otidiformis, which is an adzebill.”

A Kea pecks at a car tyre in Arthur’s Pass in North Canterbury. (FOTOPRESS/Ross Land via Getty Images)

It’s considered unlikely by Dr Worthy that Heracles inexpectatus would have been a master of the sky, given how big it was. However, it could still have used height to its advantage. 

“When you’re a parrot, you’ve got a third leg (because of the big beak.) So the kākāpō can’t fly, but it can still get to the top of rimu trees and forage in the canopy. And what they tend to do is glide back down to the ground, so I’d be surprised if it couldn’t glide downhill if it wanted to.” 

Imagine that – you’re having a lovely walk through the forest, wearing a lovely floral hat perhaps, before a monstrous creature swoops down on you from above. It would have been heavy, to say the least. 

It probably also would have had a mighty beak, though the fossil that was discovered didn’t have one attached. However, extrapolating out from the kākāpō, which Heracles inexpectatus was about twice the size of, it could well have exerted quite a bit of force, said Dr Scofield.  

“We can say the legs were twice the size of a kākāpō, and so the bill could have been twice as strong as a kākāpō. And anyone who’s been bitten by a kākāpō will tell you, they’ve got an extraordinary force in their bill.”

“So if the entire body was scaled in much the same way as the kākāpō, it would’ve had a rather impressive and rather powerful bill – much more powerful than any parrot living today.” 

But would it have been a threat to humans, like kea are to sheep or rental cars? Dr Worthy wasn’t so convinced about this, but did caution that parrots shouldn’t be underestimated. 

“I think generally parrots are clever things. It would potentially have the ability to be destructive, for sure. A kākā for instance is hard to keep in a cage, because it can rip all the nails out. This thing was obviously bigger than that, and would have the potential to do a lot more damage to a car parked at a ski-field.”