New Zealand Sweet Stakes

Natural History, May, 2001 by Laura Sessions

For native residents of southern beech forests to recover, New Zealanders have to play an active role. No pest-control measures currently available can turn the situation around, but various tools are being developed, such as the poisoning of wasp nests and the use of biological controls. This year, one operation succeeded in eradicating 90 percent of the wasp nests within a 740-acre area, enough to restore the honeydew to natural levels and to protect other invertebrates from wasp predation. If, at last, this little invader and its mammalian counterparts are restrained, the reward will be southern beech forests once again alive with the songs of honeydew-collecting birds rather than the drone of invading wasps.

Laura Sessions ("New Zealand Sweet Stakes," page 64) first read E. O. Wilson's article "The Little Things That Run the World" as an undergraduate biology student and says she has been looking for examples ever since. Honeydew insects in the southern beech forests of New Zealand fill the bill. Sessions moved to New Zealand from the United States in 1996. After finishing her master's degree at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch--on the effects of Australian brush-tailed possums on New Zealand plants--she enrolled in a doctoral program there in science communication. Sessions leads natural history tours of New Zealand for American students and recently visited South Georgia and other subantarctic islands, where she had an opportunity to "play with the penguins and sea lions."