The secret world of crabs
To some people, crabs are ugly, aggressive scavengers that nip the toes of unsuspecting bathers in cartoons. To biologist John Walsby they are beautiful, complex creatures whose lives are full of intriguing secrets.
To some people, crabs are ugly, aggressive scavengers that nip the toes of unsuspecting bathers in cartoons. To biologist John Walsby they are beautiful, complex creatures whose lives are full of intriguing secrets.
This story might have begun by saying that Whangarei's Clapham's Clock Museum is no more than a display of superfluous anachronism to those of us who don't wear watches and prefer to tell the time by looking at the sky, listening to our bellies or succumbing to fatigue. But the museum, which houses 1200 clocks and watches along with other clockwork items and related curiosities, defies expectations. With its hand clock, circa 1730, it caters even for horological simpletons. Entitled "The Country Man's Companion", the hand clock is a set of instructions for making a sundial out of the palm of your hand and a small stick. The museum had its origin in a lifelong private collection assembled by Whangarei resident Archibald Clapham. He started with a music box given as a present on his seventh birthday. He visited New Zealand from his native Yorkshire in 1903 on a "working holiday" which lasted the rest of his life. In his 80th year Clapham vested 400 clocks and watches in the Whangarei City Council, after displaying them to the public in his own home for many years. In 1962 the collection was installed in its own building, an ex-restrooms/ dental clinic/Plunket rooms in downtown Cafler Park. Since then, the collection, administered by the now Whangarei District Council, has grown through purchase and donation to become what is said to be the largest clock and watch collection in the Southern Hemisphere. Two years ago the building was extended to accommodate the growth. Clapham, engineer, orchardist, farmer and mechanical fanatic, is reputed to have spent hours drilling lengthways through a pin with an Archimedes hand-drill just for the fun of it. His sense of humour and his loyalty to the clockmakers' dictum "a good clock should amuse and charm as well as instruct" are, along with his skills, evident in the clocks of his own devising on display. There's the frying pan clock, complete with painted chook and egg and a butter knife and cake fork for hands, and "The Nark" from which the time is read anti-clockwise. To add further confusion, the dial has been moved round one hour. Reversed clocks originated in US barber shops where they allowed customers to read the time in the mirror while undergoing the shave and bay rum. More mischief can be seen in the 1930s mirror mounted, moving-eyes clock into which Clapham set photographs of his own eyes. These now slowly rove the domain of his enthusiasm, watching the watchers watch the watches. Although the museum houses many antique clocks, it is for the variety that the collection is known — everything from an oversized Mickey Mouse watch, through a gaggle of gilded rococo timepieces, to a sea-going coconut water clock which, floating in a barrel, filled with water through a pinhole and sank upon the hour. From the esoteric to the scientific to the kitsch and frankly commercial, the array is stunning. Peacocks, elephants, hummingbirds hovering over twisted glass waterfalls, gothic cathedrals, rose onyx pedestals, ferris wheels, appliqued shells and even Hickory Dickory Dock with mechanical mouse contrast with the complexities of self-winding atmospheric clocks, an airforce clock for plotting flight positions and a large speaker's clock from Parliament. More sinister are a World War II time bomb mechanism and a small, silver desk c lock and calendar which stopped during the Napier earthquake and has never been wound since. One of the oldest on display is a brass lantern clock made by Robert Hynam in London (later watchmaker to the Czar of Russia) in 1750, but the oldest in concept is a clepsydra (thief of time) a facsimile of a clock made in 1715 in Salisbury, which itself was copied from an Egyptian water clock in use in 2000 BC.a small, silver desk clock and calendar which stopped during the Napier earthquake and has never been wound since. Most of the clocks and watches on display actually go. Attendants wind them once a day. One, an English grandfather or long case clock, is kept at the accepted time with a notice affixed stating "Correct Time". Staff say, "We let the rest do their own thing." The unwary visitor may be unnerved by a cacophony of ticks, bangs, tocks, dongs, tinkles, cuckoos trilling and buglers bugling; frightened at close quarters by serious chimes, and soothed by the resonant tones of the giant "Komet" juke box (1890-1900). For ten cents (converted from a penny), the Komet plays the William Tell Overture or any one of 50 different pieces, reading the tunes from 26"-diameter spring steel discs stored in racks inside the cabinet. The Komet, which originally played on the coastal ship Whakatiri, sits incongruously next to the thoroughly '90s soft-drink dispenser, not far from a metre-long clockwork waka which proclaims in large letters along its hull "Does Not Tell The Time". Clocks, like lives and times, are full of the eccentricities that reflect politics and society. The large, hand-carved, German trumpeter clock (1810) reveals two distinctly Scots kilted trumpeters. Apparently, around that time Lowland Scots, persecuted by the imperial English, left home and threw in their lot with German mercenaries, who allowed them to retain their chosen mode of dress — hence their appearance in a German clock. Clapham's Clock Museum offers its own ironies in a town where time matters perhaps less than anywhere else in the country, given that Whangarei has New Zealand's highest unemployment rate per capita. Staff at the museum leave out bowls of catfood and milk for the park cat, but you can't help noticing that no one feeds the derelict humans who sleep under newspapers in the punga gazebo down past the formal beds of roses and the wrought-iron wishing well. Clapham's Clock Museum is open seven days per week, 10am-4pm. Group tours are welcome and can be guided.
In Summer the nights are dominated by Orion and his attendant dogs, Canis Major and Minor, together with the head of Taurus, the bull. Being south of the Equator, we see the traditional patterns of the stars inverted, so although the shapes remain distinct, their associations are masked; Orion standing on his head is neither heroic nor likely. To us, the stars forming his belt and sword suggest a cast iron pot. But for the Maori, Orion at setting was one of their great, double-hulled, ocean-going canoes whose mat sails had enabled them to drive south where no one had gone before. To astronomers, this area lying immediately south of the Milky Way is one of the most interesting and accessible regions, and contains many objects which are bright enough to be easily seen with binoculars or small telescopes. Obvious even to the unaided eye is the concentration of the brightest stars towards the plane of the galaxy, marked by the Milky Way. That these stars are not scattered uniformly over the celestial sphere was first established in 1847 by Sir John Herschel. Unexpectedly, in 1870, when John Gould described the composition and anatomy of this band of bright stars (which now bears his name), he found that it is tilted about 16 degrees to the equatorial plane of the galaxy, In 1924 Harlow Shapley and Annie Cannon showed that the tilt of Gould's belt is the result of the many hot blue stars in it. Apart from novae and supernovae, the blue giants are the brightest stars at visual wavelengths, and so are conspicuous to the naked eye. However, being massive, they are youngsters in comparison to our sun. Ranging from five to perhaps 60 solar masses, or even more, they burn their nuclear fuels at high speed, and generally are less than 100 million years old when they leave the Main Sequence of stellar life. Cooling and reddening as they enter their long drawn out death throes, both Betelgeuse in Orion and Aldebaran are such stars, and are perceptibly orange. Compared to such stars, the Sun is a positive Strudlebug, being already about 5000 million years old, and projected to remain on the Main Sequence for another 5000 million years. There are advantages in moderation! The giant blue stars are galactic markers as well as mariners' navigational beacons, for they are recent creations of the great pressure waves which circulate around the galaxy. When these waves pass through the hands of gas and dust which we see as dark nebulae in the Milky Way, a swarm of new stars is formed. The smallest have masses like that of the Sun, and are at first hidden in the depths of the cloud of material from which they condensed. These, the T Tauri stars, are seldom visible during the early stages of their lives, but there is a most famous exception to be found in Messier 42, the Orion nebula. Here the ball of gas and dust has been blown out on the side towards us so that we look into its heart and at the stars of the Trapezium — which are some of the youngest stars which we can observe. In fact, these stars are but the brightest and core stars of a cluster of some 300 which are estimated to be no more than 300,000 years old — only one five hundred thousandth of the estimated age of the universe. The giant stars, those with masses six to sixty times that of the sun, are generated deep inside massive gas clouds, and appear to need highly energetic events, such as the explosion of a nearby supernova, to trigger their formation. But once up and running, these stars produce intense ultraviolet radiation which blasts away the parent cloud in short order, leaving these newborn stars to dominate the sky. In the Pleiades we appear to be seeing this process in its last stages, for the entire group is still embedded in the remnants of a cloud which now appears as shreds and wisps of fluorescing gas. During the heroic days of observational astronomy—the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—this section of Gould's belt posed more problems than it offered solutions. Having no model of stellar energy production, nor any satisfactory means of categorising the various types of star, the observers of the time worked both literally and metaphorically in the dark, and were often at a loss for acceptable descriptions of the objects under examination. Nebulae, in particular, were troublesome. Were they or were they not multi-stellar? Was or was one not just getting a hint of resolution into stars? In Taurus lies the planetary nebula N.G.C. 1514, which is a white dwarf star surrounded by a shell of hot gas blown off when the original star became a supernova. In November 1790, after long and careful observation, Sir William Herschel reported: "A most singular phenomenon; a star 8th magnitude, with a faint luminous atmosphere of circular form, about 3' in diameter. The star is perfectly in the centre, and the atmosphere so diluted, faint, and equal throughout, that there can be no surmise of its consisting of stars, nor can there be a doubt of the evident connection between the atmosphere and the star." Nothing in the physics of the eighteenth century could account for emission nebulosity as we know it. Herschel's conjecture concerning a "luminous fluid" in the depths of space was a courageous step, for he not only conjured a new entity into existence, but also had to scrap one of his most firmly held beliefs, that all that shines is stellar, and this forced him to reconsider the picture of the universe which he had been constructing for the past fifteen years. On January 16, 1991, New Zealanders will witness a classical wonder when the sky dragon eats the sun and night falls at noon. On that day, just after 12 pm N.Z.S.T., the shadow of the moon will sweep in from the Tasman, crossing the coast at Westport, then on to Blenheim, Wellington and south of Masterton before passing out into the Pacific. Because of the moon's distance from the earth at this time, this will be an annular solar eclipse — that is, the moon will not completely cover the sun, but at totality, the moment when the observer, the centre of the moon and the centre of the sun all lie on the same line, we will still see the edge of the sun's disc around that of the moon. Unlike lunar eclipses, where the moon passes into the shadow of the earth and the event is visible from anywhere on the night side of the earth, solar eclipses can only be seen from within a band averaging about 160km wide. This band, the path of totality, marks the only area from which the moon appears to cover the sun; on either side of it observers will see only part of the sun's disc covered. Thus, at 1211 hours, when people in Blenheim can see the moon centered on the sun, Aucklanders will see the sun as a thick crescent, and at Scott Base the edge of the moon will be seen just lapping onto the sun. For this eclipse the path of totality is 140km north and south of the central track from Wanganui to Ross in the west and from Hastings to Cheviot in the east. Within these limits the whole disc of the moon will be seen against, but eccentric to, that of the sun. To see the discs concentric to one another, observers must be as near as possible to the centre line of the eclipse. Although annular eclipses deny us a view of the solar carona, that great halo of hot gas extending far above the sun's disc as we can normally see it, this event will be worth seeing, for there will not be another eclipse of the sun visible from New Zealand until 2036, which is too far into the future for most of us to count on being around to see it. Although the Black Dragon almost succeeds in swallowing the sun, what remains visible of the solar disc is as bright as ever. Because so little of the sun is in view at totality, the day will darken, but if you look at the sun, the little crescent remaining which imprints on your retina will have undiminished brightness per unit area, and be as damaging as ever, producing an irreparable burn and blind area. Therefore, under no circumstances look directly at the sun without a suitable filter such as welder's glass, several layers of fully exposed and developed black & white film or two or three layers of aluminised foil such as florists use. Do not use photographic neutral density filters, as they pass infra-red which will burn your retina. Better by far is to view a projected image using a telescope or binoculars to throw an image on a sheet of white paper. Alternatively, a good, clean pinhole in a sheet of thin card, or better still, aluminium foil, will produce a projected image of the sun —as do the gaps between the leaves of the trees. That dappled light we normally pass by is in reality a myriad pinhole images of the solar disc, which during an eclipse are changed into a like number of crescent slivers.
The sound of the wind tearing buildings apart woke the inhabitants of Inglewood at 3.30am on Sunday August 12 as a tornado swept through the town. Forty-three buildings were damaged, people were thrown across rooms, hundreds of windows blown in and slivers of glass embedded in a cot, yet, miraculously, no one was killed. The luckiest survivor may have been Paul Dodds. A 400kg steel beam was carried 100 metres and lifted over a two-storey building by the wind before it crashed into the room where he was sleeping, bringing down the roof on top of him. Fortunately, several cars in the garage attached to the room held the debris up and prevented Mr Dodds from being crushed. Many trees were uprooted or snapped off, some sheep were killed by flying roofing iron, and three goats were carried high up into the trees of a shelter belt. Although the drama in Inglewood was over in minutes, on Mount Ruapehu it lasted six days. The summit of Ruapehu is almost 3000 metres above sea level. At this altitude the winds were gale force or stronger for days, and the temperatures well below zero. Heavy snow and strong winds on the Saturday forced climbers to take shelter, either in huts or in caves dug into the snow. Even when the snowfall eased, the visibility remained poor due to blowing snow and cloud. But most dangerous of all was the effect of the cold. With sub-zero temperatures and gale force winds, death from exposure can come in a matter of minutes. These conditions caused the tragic death of six young servicemen who were on a training exercise. Their party of 13 successfully dug a snow cave on Saturday, but left it during a lull in the weather on Sunday. They had only travelled 150 metres when conditions forced them to halt. They were unable to dig another cave and only managed a long trench. Two of the party left on Sunday evening in a desperate attempt to get off the mountain and get help. After an eleven-hour walk they raised the alarm. Rescuers who reached the party on Monday found only five of the 11 still alive. These survivors were successfully brought off the mountain, but the bodies had to be left for three more days. Nearby, a Japanese climber, Jo Ji Iwama, had also left his snow cave on Sunday. However, after walking some distance, he was successful in his attempt to build a second snow cave, where he stayed until the fine weather on Thursday morning enabled him to walk down the mountain to an emotional reunion with friends. In Motueka, rain on the Saturday and Sunday caused flooding that took one life and caused millions of dollars of damage. A skier was killed in an avalanche on Mount Olympus in Canterbury on the Saturday, and the weather played a part in some of the fatal road accidents around the country during the weekend. The depression that caused all this weather had developed over the North Tasman Sea on Friday, then deepened rapidly as it moved southeast to cross the South Island on Sunday evening. The cold front ahead of the low brought the heavy snow to Ruapehu on the Saturday. Thunderstorms developed in the cold air behind the front, and one of these brought the tornado to Inglewood. It was the gap between the front and these thunderstorms that lured the climbers out of their first snow caves. As the thunderstorms went past the mountain, the wind direction shifted from north-north-west to west-north-west, and this may have contributed to the deterioration that forced the climbers to attempt to dig their second snow caves. The heavy rain in Motueka and Nelson was mostly caused by the front, but the thunderstorms also contributed. The northerly winds blowing from the sea to the land were forced to rise when they met the mountains around Nelson, and this enhanced the rainfall considerably. By Sunday afternoon these winds turned westerly as the low moved over Westland, and the rain had all but ceased. The conditions experienced on Ruapehu as this depression crossed New Zealand were a grim reminder of how much more severe the weather can be at 3000 metres than at sea level. Winds are frequently twice as strong as at low levels, and often last longer, and temperatures in winter are almost always below freezing. Nor is weather like this particularly rare in winter. In fact, the following weekend saw a depression of even greater intensity cross the centre of the country. There were no reports of climbers in trouble on Ruapehu, but southerly gales brought miserable weather to Wellington for the rugby and rugby-league tests against Australia.
From 1860 to 1864 Samuel Butler chased sheep in the foothills of the Southern Alps, explored unknown mountain passes and propounded his philosophies to the gentlefolk of Canterbury. He left behind a legend and a 100,000-acre sheep station, Mesopotamia. It was there that novelist James McNeish went to discover what it was that inspired one of the world's great satirists.
During the month of November, 67 athletes ran, cycled and kayaked their way from Cape Reinga to Bluff in the inaugural Xerox Challenge, billed as the toughest multi-discipline endurance race in the world.
We've come a long way from the papyrus reeds of the ancient Egyptians to the galaxy of paper products we use today. But, then again, not as far as you might think. The essence of papermaking is an elegantly simple process...
Deep in the subantarctic, where the Furious Fifties welcome no intruder, aspiring settlers and shipwrecked sailors encountered despair and failure on the Auckland Islands. Today these same islands are regarded as some of New Zealand's most magnificent wild places.
3
$1 trial for two weeks, thereafter $8.50 every two months, cancel any time
Already a subscriber? Sign in
Signed in as . Sign out
Ask your librarian to subscribe to this service next year. Alternatively, use a home network and buy a digital subscription—just $1/week...
Subscribe to our free newsletter for news and prizes