My Account
It was during childhood camping holidays at Coromandel that Andrew Jeffs, 52, became interested in marine life. He wound up at NZ’s biggest marine research institute, NIWA, spending two years as general manager of aquaculture and biotechnology. But he decided he missed working in the field, and in 2007 went back to his roots. The part-time Matheson Bay resident and recently-appointed Professor of Marine Science at Leigh Marine Laboratory is passionate about New Zealand’s environment and shares his story with Andre Hueber…
I was raised in Remuera in Auckland and went to Auckland Grammar. We used to go camping to the coast. Family friends had a bach in Tairua and I spent lots of time swimming, looking in rock pools and chasing crabs with a stick. I didn’t do that well at school but I had two inspiring biology teachers. One was Mr Moffat, who was quite strict but he made the subject come alive. I left at 17 and went straight to Auckland University and enrolled in a BSc majoring in biology. I was involved in a summer student scheme where I spent time at Leigh Marine Laboratory helping others do research. It clicked. I travelled overseas for a bit and came back and did a master’s degree looking at the relationship between limpets and seaweed.
However, I couldn’t find a job so I did a diploma in journalism and became a science/environmental reporter for the NZ Herald in 1986. The pay was terrible. I covered general news as well and wrote about a massive hailstorm in Hillsborough and an elephant that escaped from a circus at Mt Smart Stadium. I had a front-page lead about the National Poisons Centre when the Government slashed funding. I learnt how to write under pressure, which helped me a lot in my career. One day I saw a job advertised with DoC, in Wellington, where they’d set up a marine unit – creating marine reserves. I worked there for five years from 1988. I worked with DoC offices around the country, special interest groups and Maori, giving advice about marine reserves and consultation around the Resource Management Act. I saw a lot of New Zealand but DoC kept restructuring and I had to reapply for my job several times. It became demoralising.
I decided to go back to Auckland University and do a PhD, looking at the populations of Bluff oysters at Kawau, Manukau and Kaipara, and the potential for farming them in the north. I then got a scholarship from the Cawthron Institute in Nelson and worked for them for four years. I came close to handing in my PhD, but then I bumped into the chief executive of NIWA, who was giving a guest lecture. He said: “Why don’t you come and work for us?” I thought it was a throwaway line but as it turns out he was serious and he offered me a postdoctoral fellowship, which was a junior science position.
I started in the Auckland office working on crayfish in 1998. They have an interesting life cycle. The parents mate and the female carries the eggs for three to four months before she releases them. They’re the size of a pinhead and drift hundreds of kilometres offshore. After two years they grow into the size of a 50c piece. The larvae fold up and turn into what looks like a crayfish. They’re transparent and look like a jellybean. They swim 200km back to the coast without feeding and then hide in a crack in a reef and grow into a crayfish. I thought the whole process was fascinating. The jellybean has a store of fat and swims until it is exhausted – it’s a one-shot wonder. My hypothesis was that they hear the sound of the waves. It inspired me as to how sound influences animals.
Experiments showed sound didn’t have an effect on crayfish but it did on fish larvae. I built a novel setup using underwater speakers made for synchronised swimming. I rearranged them at sea with a car battery and ghetto blaster. I took a recording of a reef, and the fish larvae did indeed think it was a reef. At the same time, NIWA was interested in whether you could farm crayfish. You can, but it takes a year-and-a-half to grow babies from eggs, is incredibly difficult and not economic. The international lobster fishery is worth close to $1 billion a year and lots of fisheries have declined dramatically in the last five to eight years. We think climate change is the cause. Ocean conditions change and food isn’t there. They can’t fill up their tanks so swim to shore when their tanks ,are half empty.
I was promoted to general manager at NIWA and became head of aquaculture and marine biotechnology but I missed the discovery part of it – that’s the exciting bit. I thought I needed a break and quit in 2007. In the meantime, John Montgomery, who’s head of department at Leigh Marine Laboratory, asked me if I wanted to help out with teaching, so I became associate professor in marine science. I teach, lecture and run the post-graduate aquaculture programme. At the moment I’m overseeing student projects looking at how climate change is changing the ocean system, how mussel farms can control parasitic crabs, how to control sea squirt fouling, how to get rid of a new barnacle in the Hauraki Gulf and how underwater sounds affect fish in the Kaipara Harbour. I also work as a consultant for international seafood companies – giving advice on things like the environmental impact of crayfish farming in Malaysia.
Aquaculture is growing quickly in New Zealand but there’s quite a lot of friction over it. You have to weigh it against other types of production. It’s a lot cleaner than land-based production. There’s a lot of interest in new finfish species like groper and kingfish. I split my time between my home in Parnell and my bach at Matheson Bay, which I bought in 1999.
My wife Jackie works at Middlemore Hospital and we’ve got two kids. Max is 17 and studying in Australia and my daughter Nina, 14, is at Senior College. I love the area around Leigh. The coastline is gorgeous, the marine life is amazing and there’s so much to explore. My favourite spot is Pink Beach, halfway between Goat Island and Okakari. It’s a perfect bay with nikau and pohutukawa – it’s great for snorkeling.
I flew from Tauranga the other day and to see the brown plumes in the Firth of Thames, coming off the dairy farms, was horrific. When you drive along the Puhoi River you can see cows crapping in the water. It goes down the river and past Wenderholm so people end up swimming in cowshit. How does a farmer have the right to contaminate a public waterway? We look at farming and think that’s what is normal but it has consequences in terms of the marine environment. Over-fishing is also a big issue. The Hauraki Gulf used to have massive numbers of green-lipped mussels but they were fished out in the 1950s. Mussel beds are crucial as a habitat for juvenile fish. Maybe the decline of snapper is related.
