“You can see exactly what’s there,” says Dr Peter Maddison. “It gives us a big picture of our streams, it’s amazing. We can find out what fish are in there, what mammals are surrounding, then there’s a whole lot of worms and plant life and a huge amount of bacteria that we know nothing about.”
Some of the main groups of things found collectively were: 258 bacteria species, 59 fungi species, 97 algae species, 98 insect species, 53 worm species, 66 higher plant species and 61 rotoza species, to mention just a few.
“We found certain things we didn’t know were there, but we had suspected. We found that there were trout in the Waiau - we didn’t know that. The shortjaw kōkopu was found in the Uretara. Another that we didn’t know about was freshwater jellyfish, which I have heard about, in nearly all the streams.
“There’s some amazing things, such as the number of bacteria, and that includes all sorts of bacteria. There’s all the bacteria here that cause all sorts of human diseases... it’s nothing to worry about, it is what we would expect.”
The testing confirms what they have found from the river samples they have been conducting, Peter says.
The environmental DNA display will be at the Western Bay Museum for the next three months.
