Yes. What they found for rabbits, back in the day whilst figuring out how to design it, was that they'd always go right up to the fence and then try to dig. If they hit metal then they'd move sideways rather than backwards, so the skirt goes about 40cm outwards and that prevents all the rabbit incursions.
At the time I don't think they ever imagined the need to design for tuatara burrowing outwards, but probably good that it's only starting to become a question at about the time they've been planning for the fence to be replaced anyway. It'll be interesting to see if and how this affects all the other fenced sanctuaries that have sprung up later.
Another bonus of replacing the fence is that they'll be able to change the mesh, as the original one didn't have small enough holes to prevent baby mice getting through. I'm not sure how the mice inside will be properly eradicated after that's done. The original eradication was (I think) a brodifacoum drop which would no longer be practical unless everything important was somehow cleared out from inside the fence first.
I coincidentally went to a talk about it tonight where it was noted they're getting so populous that there's a new suspected risk of tuatara burrowing under the fence and letting something bad in.
The fence is due to be replaced within the next decade, and apparently they have tentative plans for an adjusted design to prevent this from happening.
I guess it's a good problem to have.
To elaborate however, although Zealandia has a fenced "scientific" enclosure for Tuatara near the front, there's a separate group of them running wild around the rest of the sanctuary (though still inside the main fence). There's a particular track up near the back of the fence with artificial burrows where they're encouraged to hang out. You can often encounter them in the tracks near there, but it's also completely possible to meet them effectively living wild anywhere else within the fence, and also not entirely uncommon.
But yeah they basically don't live on the mainland outside fenced sanctuaries at all any more. Rats interfered too much that they were effectively gone from the mainland from some time after Maori arrival.
My thoughts too. From memory sales of double cab utes also surged immediately before and plummeted immediately after the prices went up as expected due to their high emissions.
I remember them in the UK when we visited as long ago as 2012. My main recollection was that they seemed very effective at causing you to think very carefully about your speed, because in a long line of traffic nobody wants to be the person who drives extra slow to make up for accidentally going too fast a few seconds earlier.
I'm curious to know the reasons for them apparently being hated.
Just on this, it's extremely hard for unestablished political parties to get established in NZ. I think a thing we constantly need to be conscious of, though, is the possibility of existing established parties being infiltrated and redirected from within.
Several major parties this election have list candidates who'd not look out of place in some of the much more fringe parties. It's not as if we haven't had fringe candidates enter Parliament previously via existing parties, and they have tended to be either controlled from the top down or ejected, but those groups are getting more organised and aren't as stupid as some people like to think.
If the US is anything to go by, they started with school boards and local politics which often have lower turnout and less attention. Since then, one of the two major political parties has effectively been usurped and reshaped by people who'd simply not have had a significant place in political life two or three decades ago.
It's been a while since I've seen TNG and maybe my memory's bad, but the first one that came to mind, Data's Day, seems to be one that nobody's yet listed.
This is really interesting. Is it something to do with people wanting to feel as if they're on the winning team, even though you can effectively declare you're voting for someone and there's still no way for anyone to prove it*?
* Although the recent trend from the past couple of elections of people photographing their completed ballot papers and posting to social media really needs to be clamped down upon, imho.
As an MP Sir Geoffrey Palmer had a huge impact on the interlocking shapes of government and parliament. The great reformer is still brimming with ideas for improvement.
For those able to do so, listening to the 15 minutes of interview from RNZ this week is worthwhile (audio link is a few paragraphs in). Otherwise RNZ's text is an okay summary.
For me the most interesting part of this is Geoffrey Palmer's logic for wanting more MPs in Parliament. In short, he's arguing that we need more MPs, but a smaller Cabinet, to protect our democracy from populism and perhaps authoritarian populism. His reasoning is that most of NZ's process relies on the government being accountable to Parliament. Back-bench MPs presently, however, are drastically overworked when it comes to being able to process and understand everything needed for effectively holding the government to account between the other work they have to do.
He thinks we need at least 150 MPs, and that the size of Cabinet should be capped at 20 to increase the ratio of back-bench MPs over Cabinet MPs. (Presently we have 120 MPs but 30 are Ministers.) It'd mean Ministers would hold more portfolios, but also that they'd not be so siloed from each other. It'd also mean that the task of understanding the complexities of legislation that goes through the House, and through Select Committees, would be shared among more MPs.
He's also shared thoughts about Parliamentary process and the electoral system, wants better civics education, and expresses thoughts on misinformation.
For those who don't know him, Geoffrey Palmer is a former MP and Minister known from the 1980s Labour government. He took over as Prime Minister for about a year after Lange stepped down, but left that role shortly before the 1990 election. Apart from the controversies of that government though, he's also an obsessive legal nerd when it comes to constitutional law and Parliamentary process.