This Wacky Wildlife post highlights the ecological history of Oceania and awesome non-avian animals my family and I encountered on our trip to southern Queensland, Australia and Kaikōura in the South Island of Aotearoa New Zealand from June to July 2024. Underwater wonders we encountered are featured in my separate post on the Great Barrier Reef and Lady Elliot Island. My kid and I are working on a separate dedicated bird-focused post and hope to share it with you in the first half of 2025.
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Jump to:
- trip overview
- ecological history of Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand
- photos and videos of wacky wildlife!
Trip overview
Below are the locations where we took the photos and videos featured in this post and the post dedicated to the Great Barrier Reef. We chose our trip locations for their accessibility (for walking, taking public transit, and rental car driving) and ability to see wildlife.
Australia locations:
- Lady Elliot Island in the southern Great Barrier Reef (click here to see my post on reef life!)
- K’gari (Fraser Island), the world’s largest sand island
- Noosa National Park on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast
- Mary Cairncross Scenic Reserve in the Hinterlands
- Brisbane, capital city of Queensland
Aotearoa New Zealand locations:
We’ll feature more NZ locations in our upcoming Wacky Wildlife post on birds!
Ecological history and biodiversity of Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand
Australia is considered one of the 17 megadiverse countries in the world by the UN Environment Programme, which means it has high biological diversity as determined by the number of species unique to it as a single country. We focused our month-long trip on a tiny biodiverse area of southern Queensland, on the Eastern coast of Australia, from the Great Barrier Reef’s Lady Elliot Island and Sunshine Coast down to Brisbane.
Oceania has a fascinating ecological history. This region of our planet broke off from the supercontinent Pangea 180 million years ago as part of Gondwana, then separated from India and Antarctica 80 million years ago. Around that time, volcanic activity led Zealandia, along the outer edge of Gondwana, to break off and move into the Pacific Ocean, much of it getting submerged. The part of Zealandia that pushed against the Pacific tectonic plate rose up over the past 5 million years, forming present-day Aotearoa New Zealand. After Australia became isolated 80 million years ago, megafauna evolved, such as hippo-sized 6,000-pound wombats, 10-feet-tall flightless birds, marsupial lions, and sheep-sized echidnas. Aotearoa New Zealand, geographically isolated for 55 million years, became a haven for birds and other plants adept at crossing large oceanic barriers, settling in this unique predator-free land and evolving with NZ’s dynamic ecology into many species of flightless birds.
The first humans came to Australia about 50-to-80,000 years ago from Southeast Asia, a major achievement in sea-crossing. Early Aboriginal Australians dispersed around the northern and southern coastal regions and the desert central region, forming more than 400 distinct languages and a huge diversity of cultural practices. Dreaming stories, containing Aboriginal oral histories, teachings and philosophies, tell stories of megafauna. For example, the Adnyamathanha story of the big scary Yamuti is told to protect children, and perhaps comes from the time people lived alongside Diprotodon, the largest marsupial to have existed and went extinct along with Australia’s other megafauna, like the giant echidna, about 40,000 years ago. Tens of thousands of years later, the arrival of Europeans in the 1700s resulted in massive land development, disease, and the pillaging of lumbar and other natural resources, which has only accelerated in the past 60 years. Human settlement and climate change has led to the loss of 40% of Australia’s forests and rapid extinctions of many of these unique species.
In Aotearoa New Zealand, the impact of European settlement is even more visibly stark, with about 65% of New Zealand’s forests cleared and 90% of its wetlands drained. Aotearoa New Zealand was the last habitable land mass settled by humans, with the ancestors of Māori arriving from other Pacific islands about 750 years ago. European sealers, whalers, traders and missionaries started arriving about 250 years ago. The 1840 Treaty of Waitangi established British law and government. The British representatives described the treaty promising Māori land rights, but in practice, much of Māori land was confiscated or sold to British settlers. This led to warfare in the 1840s and 1860s as Māori defended their lands and local authority. NZ’s native animals also suffered, with half of NZ’s endemic species becoming extinct since humans first arrived.
It’s hard not to feel down about the loss of the wondrous biodiversity of these regions, especially while we were ironically driving our rental car down the denuded hills and coasts of Aotearoa New Zealand. It looked like we were in rural UK with all the sheep and cattle pastures around. We had to go to dedicated predator-free eco-sanctuaries such as Zealandia Te Māra a Tāne in Wellington, Orokonui Ecosanctuary in the Otago Peninsula, and Ulva Island/Te Wharawhara off the southern tip to see native flora and fauna. We saw so few non-avian endemic land species in New Zealand, that the only animals I could include from our trip for this post were whales and dolphins I saw off the coast of Kaikōura with the excellent, Maori-owned and run Whale Watch Kaikōura. While we cannot recover the amazing creatures that are now extinct, I am heartened by the hopeful and helpful humans working hard to protect the magical places, flora and fauna that are left.
Wacky wildlife!
K’gari (Fraser Island)
K’gari, also known as Fraser Island, is the largest sand island in the world. Sand has been blowing north to this area of Queensland for the past 2 million years, with some dunes on the island more than 700,000 years old. This unique geology makes for some beautiful freshwater lakes and interesting plants and microclimates around the island. For at least 5,000 years and as many as 50,000 years, Butchulla people have lived on K’gari and have made it a place of great natural, spiritual and social significance. I had the good fortune of meeting Butchulla artist and elder Conway Burns and buy some of his art at the K’gari Cultural Tours shop in RIver Heads, Hervey Bay, where we took the ferry to and from K’gari.
Wongari (dingoes) are wild dogs descended from East Asian dogs and wolves, brought to Australia 4,000-8,000 years ago by Asian seafarers. They were likely brought to K’gari by the Butchulla people around 5,000 years ago, and due to K’gari’s isolation from the Australian mainland, they are thought to be more “wild” and “ancient” because they are less interbred with domestic dogs. They will attack small humans, especially if they are hungry, so we stayed far away from them as advised. This young female wongari happened to walk right past our tour group and was quite wary of our big group.
Noosa National Park on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast
Towards the Sunshine Beach side of the gorgeous Noosa National Park coastal walk, we saw some rustling in the grasses and saw an echidna!! We hung out for a while watching this little one snuffle and dig around the rocks and debris.
Echidnas, also called spiny anteaters, mostly feed on insects with their spikey tongues. Their spikes are modified hairs. They live to 45-50 years, likely because they stay cool (~89’F) and metabolize slowly. Echidnas are egg-laying mammals. A female can be followed by up to 10 males in a “love train,” with males competing to mate with her with their 4-headed penises (!!)! 20 days later, the female lays a leathery egg in her pouch, and after a 10-day incubation, a baby echidna, called a puggle, hatches and feeds on the milk she secretes into milk patches. Wacky and wild!
Mary Cairncross Scenic Reserve in the Hinterlands
On our way from Noosa to Brisbane, we stopped to check out the Glass Mountains and Mary Cairncross Scenic Reserve in the Hinterlands, a subtropical rainforest habitat that covered the Blackall Range before human development. The land was set aside as a reserve by three sisters presumably from one of the farming families of the area who named the reserve after their mother Mary.
Brisbane, capital city of Queensland
I loved visiting Brisbane. It was more diverse and green than I expected, especially for a big city of nearly 3 million people. We had a great time there exploring all the food, arts and culture. There are a ton of free, beautiful and well-curated museums and clean, safe, well-maintained public parks. Even the city center parks such as the Brisbane Botanic Gardens Mount Coot-tha had tons of native birds and… flying foxes!!!
Kaikōura
Kaikōura is a chill coastal town and marine biodiversity hotspot on the northeastern coast of Aotearoa New Zealand’s South Island. We flew into Wellington from Brisbane, then took a ferry down to Picton, rented a car and drove to Kaikōura. Below I highlight the Hector’s dolphins and sperm whale I saw on my phenomenal Whale Watch Kaikōura half-day boat trip in July 2024. In our next Wacky Wildlife post, we will feature the amazing seabirds that my kid and partner saw on their Albatross Encounter boat trip.
Hector’s dolphins are among the smallest and rarest dolphins in the world, found only in the waters off Aotearoa New Zealand’s South Island and measuring about 1.8 meters (a bit less than 6 feet) at full size. Their Māori name is Tutumairekurai, or “special ocean dweller.” They primarily feed on fish and squid. Hector’s dolphins are considered a nationally vulnerable species, as they have to compete with human overfishing, boat strikes, oil and gas mining, toxoplasmosis and other diseases. They live in same-gender social groups of about 14. It was a rare privilege to get to see this group playing and swimming in Kaikōura Canyon. At the end of the video you can see albatrosses flying over the dolphin pod with the mountains behind them.
Lazarus is a young male sperm whale who feeds in the uniquely rich, deep waters of Kaikōura Canyon. Sperm whales can dive to depths of over 3km and hold their breaths for up to 2 hours to feed on squid, sharks and fish. I had the good fortune of being on a wonderful Whale Watch Kaikōura boat in July 2024 that spotted him surfacing to breathe and dive back down.
To end this post, I just want to say Wowzas. Revisiting and researching more about these wacky, wonderful, wild creatures made me appreciate them all the more. It also reminds me why being in nature and being open to wonder and awe is a universal medicine. We look forward to sharing our underwater and bird encounters in our next Wacky Wildlife posts.