Frontline bugs on the move

By MATHEW DEARNALEY

Millions of desiccated insects, and a jumble of hairy-legged spiders with Hollywood connections, will take residence in an ecologically "green" building at a technology park on Auckland University land.

So will their guardians, scientists from Landcare Research, when the crown research institute shifts from Mt Albert to the university's Tamaki campus on the 1990 Commonwealth Games Village site.

Going with them will be three other major collections - of fungi, plant bacteria and sub-microscopic worms called nematodes - all crucial parts of New Zealand's defence against biological invaders.

The institute has a million pinned insects, and another 5.5 million pickled in ethanol awaiting identification, and its two floors in the seven-storey Mt Albert Research Centre, shared with other science agencies, have become too cramped for the care of such internationally important treasures.

Hollywood producer Steven Spielberg is one of the institute's fans. He contracted it to recruit 374 deadly looking but harmless Avondale spiders for lead roles in his 1990 film Arachnophobia.

Landcare Research is the first outside organisation poised to move to Tamaki, which university dons want to turn into a technology and research hub, as prescribed by experts at the Catching the Knowledge Wave conference in Auckland last month.

Construction of the institute's new quarters will start next year, and will take about two years.

The university sees a cluster of research-led agencies and technology firms sprouting up, enlivening what some of its 2000 students feel is now a desolate environment compared with the university's crowded central Auckland site.

Some students have classes on the Tamaki and the Auckland campuses, commuting the seven or eight kilometres between the two on a free hourly shuttle bus service, sometimes leaving cars parked free at Tamaki to beat city congestion.

Professor Ralph Cooney, the university's pro vice-chancellor for Tamaki, says it was relaunched several months ago as a "knowledge economy-type campus".

He wants it to become a centre of creative energy - research-intensive, interdisciplinary and entrepreneurial - as student numbers more than treble by 2010.

The goal is for half of these to be postgraduate, a far higher proportion than is usual, with opportunities to tackle projects for research institutions and high-tech firms resident on the campus, or even to start their own spin-off businesses.

In return, scientists from those institutions will be involved in teaching and mentoring students, and helping them move into paid employment.

Landcare Research prides itself on showing industry and others the way towards sustainable development, saying that a genuine knowledge economy cannot thrive without meeting high environmental and social standards while making enough money for its citizens.

Landcare Research has lofty aims for its new quarters, for which Professor Brenda Vale and Dr Robert Vale - university architecture school staff recognised as world experts on "green" buildings - will help to write the design brief and monitor its performance.

A "green"or eco-friendly building aims to minimise its impact on the local and wider environment by careful choice of building materials and design for energy conservation and re-use of waste.

Institute chief executive Dr Andy Pearce will not disclose his budget for the new building, for commercial tendering reasons.

But he says it must be economically feasible to build. It can cost more than a conventional building - but not so much that savings in energy and other operating costs will not make up the difference.

"We are not trying to build a monument - we want to try to make it as good as we can, but it has to be something that other people will want to emulate," he says.

One challenge for the builders will be to provide a controlled climate for the insect and microbial collections.

Landcare Research is responsible for research into the management of land resources for conservation and primary production. This includes examining the impact of human activities on the environment.

After being set up in 1992, with many of its staff drawn from the old Department of Scientific and Industrial Research's plant protection division, it concentrated initially on balancing competing rural-land uses.

But it has expanded its efforts into urban areas, which Dr Pearce says are our most unsustainable and resource-intensive ecosystems.

Nearly 50 of the institute's 350 or so staff work in Auckland, but it hopes to increase this number after the move to Tamaki.

Incentives to boost its Auckland presence include much-needed research into controlling the vast number of introduced weeds thriving in the region, giving it the dubious title of "weed capital" of the Southern Hemisphere.

About 65 per cent of the institute's $38 million budget comes from the Foundation for Research, Science and Technology.

Another 25 per cent is for applied research, such as for pest control, for public agencies ranging from the Conservation Department and the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry to regional and local bodies.

Private firms provide 5 per cent of the institute's revenue, for research and development underpinning commercial ventures, and the remaining 6 per cent comes from international consultancy work through agencies such as the World Bank.

This has included a five-year project, part-financed by New Zealand overseas development aid, which helped Chinese subsistence farmers boost their incomes to double those of the official poverty level by diversifying crops and livestock.

Its core work is research into controlling pests, notably the country's 70 million-strong possum population, with an emphasis on biological alternatives to poisons.

The stakes are high - New Zealand spends more than $100 million a year fighting pests and weeds.

Research costing $750,000 led to a big reduction in the amount of poisoned bait used against possums, and is estimated to have produced annual savings of more than $9 million.

The institute's flora and fauna collections, such as the four in Auckland, provide an early line of biosecurity defence.

The successful $12 million aerial-spraying campaign to eradicate an infestation of imported tussock moths in Auckland's eastern suburbs began when a member of the public sent a specimen of the devastating forestry pest to Land Research.

"We worked out within a couple of hours that this was not something familiar in New Zealand," recalls senior entomologist Dr Trevor Crosby.

Dr Peter Buchanan, a mycologist (fungal expert) and team leader for the Auckland collections, which date back to contributions from the 19th century botanist William Colenso, hopes the new quarters will allow greater scope for public viewing.

"This is a publicly funded operation and we have a responsibility to show it to the public, especially children, because if we captivate children with an understanding of natural history, we'll keep them for life."