Today I went to a beach called Castle Cliff Beach. Something that really called my attention about this beach was the black sand. This sand has this color because it has a lot of iron and it is volcanic.

Even though this sand is black it didn’t get as hot as the sand in Peru and we think this is because the sun rays in Peru hit the ground in a more direct way (close to 90 degrees) and the ones in New Zealand  hit the ground at a more oblique angle. There is a lot of drifted wood accumulated in the beach. These drifted woods are delivered to the Tasman Sea by the Wanganui River. Behind the beach there was a really big playground that had games for people of all ages. One of them was called the flying fox. I LOVED IT. This is a game where you jump from a platform and sit or stand on a small circle that is hanging from a rope until you get to the other side where there is a wheel and you bounce off.

It is hard to get off the seat because its high but it is so fun.

After leaving the Quakers Settlement we had a four hour trip to Wellington, but we stopped at Pukaha Mount Bruce, a predator proof national wildlife center.  Here, they have built a predator proof fence (2 meters high and one meter underground)

and have ongoing predator control programs (traps) to protect the native flora and fauna from invasive mammals.

Before human arrived to New Zealand, the only kind of terrestrial mammal that was there was the bat.  The Maori and the English brought mammals with them such as rats, ferrets, cats, possums, rabbits, mice, and hedgehogs.  Many of these mammals have had a negative impact on animal and plant populations on the islands, because they act as predators, they brought diseases, and competed with the native species.  The native species did not know how to defend themselves because they evolved in the absence of mammal predators.  For example, many birds in New Zealand are flightless (Kiwi, Takahe, Weka) or weak fliers (Kokako), so they cannot escape predators as easily.  Due to this many of them are today threatened and many have gone extinct (especially birds). This is why New Zealanders have to create this predator fenced reserves.   When I was in the wildlife center, I had the opportunity to see a lot of interesting animals.  I saw how they fed a species of parrot, called Kaka (they were not stinky), I also saw a white Kiwi (not an albino but with two white recessive alleles), a Kokako (who knew how to whistle and call its name) and a Takahe (flightless bird that looks like a dinosaur).

My uncle Jose Ignacio taught me about a type of defense that some plants have against herbivores.  This type of plants are called divaricating. They have really small leaves that grow from stems that are positioned at wide angles, so that the herbivores have a hard time eating the plant so they don’t choose to eat that plant.

 The last thing I saw in Mt. Bruce were Long-fin eels.  They are black, long (a meter or more) and have big heads.  Something really cool about them is that they live all their life in rivers (they can live up to 100 years!!!!!!) and when they are ready to reproduce, they swim kilometers down to the ocean to breed.  After they reproduce they die, so they only reproduce once in their life time.  The young eels swim a really long distance back to the river where their parents lived before.  How do they know where to go?  Nobody really knows, but they think the ocean currents might play a role. This is the complete opposite life cycle of the salmon.