Covering Climate Now: Dietary Requirements is The Spinoff’s monthly podcast in which we eat, drink and talk about it too, with special thanks to Freedom Farms. This month, we go crazy for crickets in a climate week special. The Spinoff’s participation in Covering Climate Now is made possible thanks to Spinoff Members. Join us here! September’s … Read more
Bex de Prospo went from running music venues to spruiking ants and locusts to the country’s best restaurants. Now, after three years of trying to make a difference, she explains why Christchurch startup Anteater is shutting its doors. As we stood, evicted, on the side of a remote road in Cambodia, watching our tuk tuk … Read more
Don Rowe takes a deep dive into the disgusting to rank the diseases and bugs currently plaguing our shores, threatening our agriculture and tourism industries. Just as our clean green image is threatened by the various turds, both bovine and backpacker, flooding into our waterways, so too is our biosecurity consistently in danger of bugs … Read more
Olly Hills couldn’t find a field guide to native New Zealand cicadas, so he decided to fill the gap in our biological literature. Angela Cuming caught up with the young biologist to talk about his first book. The idea for Cicadas of New Zealand came to Olly Hills the same way many other authors stumble … Read more
New Zealand has a long history of introducing foreign insect predators to control crop pests and weeds. How risky is that? Thanks to a lack of long-term monitoring of our native insect populations, nobody really knows, explains the University of Auckland’s Margaret Stanley. “Is there any evidence that an introduced insect, other than a social … Read more
Our favourite animal expert Thom Adams is back to reassure us about our parenting choices by looking to the animal world. I’m not sure why, but first-time parents have this weird resistance to giving their kids medicine. It happened to me, and I don’t know why. Fever, snotty noses and coughs are all natural responses … Read more