Kate Halfpenny on the downsides of a mid-life beach move
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Feminist sci fi drama by New Zealand-based writer returns to Edinburgh Fringe
One failing spacecraft - and two female astronauts fighting to save the earth is the premise behind the play "Alone", by New Zealand based writer, Luke Thornborough. It's currently making a re-appearance at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in a new streamlined version. The play has toured widely in New Zealand and Australia in past years, but this revisited version is being described as particularly relevant in a world where science is politicised, and climate change is being felt more and more. British born Thornborough, who lives on Great Barrier Island helping to restore native ecosystems, has taken this production to Edinburgh in collaboration with Alchemy Theatre, a Paris-based, female-led, international company. Staying up late to join us are Luke Thornborough and Alchemy Theatre's Charlotte Pleasants - formerly from Wellington, who is co producing. To embed this content on your own webpage, cut and paste the following: See terms of use.
NZ Herald
a day ago
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Aussie writer Kate Halfpenny on midlife, alcoholism and a sea change
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RNZ News
3 days ago
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Leopard seals' mating songs compared to nursery rhymes
Leopard seals' songs can carry a long distance across the ice. Photo: Researchers in Australia have found leopard seal songs have similarities to the way humans sing nursery rhymes to children. They took melodies by 26 individual male leopard seals and compared them to tunes made by other animals, such as humpback whales, bottlenose dolphins and squirrel monkeys, as well as human-created styles - including baroque, classical, romantic, contemporary and Beatles melodies. But while the longest Beatles songs top out at under eight minutes, these "songbirds of the Southern Ocean" can drag theirs out to 13 hours. "They'll dive down underwater and they'll sing these, really interesting sequences of about 10 different sounds, and then they'll sort of return to the surface, take a breath, and they'll do this again and again, sort of all day, University of New South Wales PhD candidate Lucinda Chambers, the study's lead author, told Midday Report . "And the really interesting thing about the leopard seals is that they all have the same, essentially like a common alphabet - they all make the same exact five sounds. But what they do differently is they'll all combine them in a unique pattern. "And when we looked at the level of essentially randomness or predictability within these individual patterns that they make, we found that they were similar in predictability to human nursery rhymes, when we compared them across a range of human music genres." Each male leopard seal does this for much of spring - from late October through early January - across the Eastern Antarctic pack ice. The animals cannot be told apart by how they sound, and nor do they really alter their singing in pitch. "It's the order and pattern that matters," Professor Tracey Rogers - also of the University of New South Wales - said in a statement. "They've stylised it to an almost boring degree, which we think is a deliberate strategy, so their call carries a long distance across the ice." The songs can be heard across long distances, they said, with females "bombarded by the sounds of males singing from all directions, all breeding season". "They might be performing these songs for a number of purposes, but the main one is these male leopard seals singing out to the females to try and attract a mate," Chambers said. But why nursery rhymes and not, say, 'Helter Skelter'? "When you think about the function of nursery rhymes for human children, you gotta think that they've got to be simple enough and sort of predictable enough in that kind of musical, melodic tune that a human child can memorise it," Chambers said. "And in the same way, we think these leopard seal sequences have to be simple enough that they're able to memorise that song and they're able to perform this song with a really high level of consistency day after day. "But there needs to be enough variation or enough kind of unpredictability that they can have that wiggle room to differentiate their song from their neighbor's song." They hoped further research would uncover whether new call types have emerged, including if the sounds change between generations. The study was published in the journal Scientific Reports . Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero, a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
