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ONE YEAR ON - BUILDING IWI MOMENTUM FOR THE USE OF AERIAL 1080. 

When we brought the kaupapa of aerial 1080 to our iwi a number of years ago the two questions that our people asked us were: Is it safe? And does it work?  The answer to both these pātai are a resounding yes. Thats the short answer. 


But to get to this conclusion, we had to apply a framework of questions:

 

  1. Eating their way through the Raukūmara are one of the highest populations of possums and rats in the country. Will 1080 effectively decrease these populations?

  2. Raukūmara is rugged, remote and has mountains to lowland forest.  Can it be used on a large scale?

  3. 1080 kōrero we had heard is that it poisons everything.  Is this true? And will it leave residue in the environment and poison our rivers?

  4. What other forests have applied cyclic 1080?


The last question was one of the first wānanga we set up.  Te Whirinaki Te Pua-ā-Tāne, Pureora, Fiordlands, Hunea Ranges, Mokaihaha, we wanted to see and kōrero to the home people directly and to see those forests that had cyclic 1080 with our own eyes. 


When we visited them what we saw was life, Mauri, Kākā screeching, Whio swimming in pristine waters, Kōkako thriving - the sounds of a living forest.  We saw forests with heathy canopy and understory, and a forest floor full of moisture and moss. This is what we wanted for our beloved Raukūmara.

 

There is a heap of made up, inaccurate kōrero and scare mongering of 1080 and some pretty disagreeable commentary about the people who advocate the use of it.  So we wanted to make sure that we did our research and led our own monitoring so that as iwi we can talk to our results and our experience.  The gift that keeps giving with the Raukūmara is that it will always tell you what is happening to it, and once you see what the forest is telling you, you can’t ‘unsee’ it. 

 

We have six monitoring sites throughout the belly of the Raukūmara measuring rat and possum presence using possum wax tags and rat tunnel ink cards.  We monitored six months before the 1080 application and three weeks after.  Before 1080, rats were up by 62% presence and possum up to 71% presence.  After 1080, we had 0% rat presence and between 0% - 3.5% possum presence in the application area.    

 

So, does 1080 work?  Our monitoring results say yes. 

Water was the other big concern our people wanted to know about.  Every aerial 1080 operation requires approval by the Ministry of Health. The MOH sets a guideline that 1080 levels in drinking water must be below 2 parts per billion (ppb), which is about three pin heads on a rugby field. 

 

At these levels, an adult weighing 70 kg would have to drink 70,000 litres or 230 bathtubs full (see pic below) of contaminated water in one go to receive a fatal dose.


But what happened with our 1080 operation?  Because we did not buffer all streams and rivers, because rats and possum live there too.

We knew that only a very small fraction of the pellet (0.15%) contains 1080 – the rest is non toxic cereal, green dye and cinnamon.  We saw the way the bait pellets landed on the ground, and as they got wet after two days they were losing their green colour, after three days they started to swell and break apart.  


We saw when a bait pellet landed in water, two things happened:  the pellet started to break down almost immediately and the green dye diluted.  We know this because we were up our rivers every day for nearly two months after the application.  If 1080 was poisoning our water we expected to see straight away belly up fish and floating dead eels in their masses.  What we saw though were eels swimming alive and happy as.  We found no dead fish.  We did 28 water monitoring tests within 24 hours of each operation.  All the tests were collected by our own people, and sent to an independent lab in Christchurch. All of our results came back detecting no 1080. 

So, is 1080 safe?  We say yes.


115,837 hectares of Raukūmara received aerial 1080 between April 2023 to June 2024.  The next aerial 1080 application is schedule for 2026.

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