In the beginning, the Skyfather... Ranganwi, and the earth mother, Papa Tuwanuku, were locked in a tight embrace, and their children lived in the dark space in between them. One day, their son, Tanenwi Arangi, hushed his parents apart, creating the separate earth and sky. But following their separation, this newly created world was dark, and Tane Nui Arangi needed to find a source of light to illuminate it.
So he looked towards the sky and found the smallest, most fragile star, called Hine Roa Moa. They came together and had a daughter, the goddess of childbirth and weaving, and she would inspire a method to help save the oceans. in the 21st century. One of my tribes was a matriarchal tribe so it just made sense that we would look to female ancestors to help guide our work.
I'm Julia Ravey. And I'm Ella Hopper. We're scientists turned radio presenters. And these are the stories we wish we'd known when we were starting out as scientists. This is Unstoppable for Discovery on the BBC World Service. Today's story is all about combining the old with the new to help solve problems caused by our modern day society and how one particular research has fully embraced her culture in an effort to save our oceans. And her name is Cura Paul Beck.
So this story all begins with the source and foundation of all life. What would you say Ella is your foundation of life? My foundation of life I guess is RNA, DNA. That's your foundation of life. That is the foundation of life. Give me something personal. That's what I'm here for. Cup of tea. That was my one. I was going to say a cup of tea. I think that's the thing that sustains me the most.
But in this instance, I'm talking about water and specifically the sea and oceans in relation to Maori cultures, the original settlers in Ateoroa or New Zealand. Okay, so what makes water so important in Maori culture? So Maori view the water as an essential energy for life. And the ocean is a huge part of New Zealand's identity. And so it is very important to protect Moana.
Moana, does that mean ocean? It does. And there is one scientist who sees Moana as the place she is most at home. Oh, Julia, I love it. If I'm on a boat, I look in the water and I think... I need to be in the water. So once I'm in the water, then I'm home. It's a spiritual... Connectivity of a place where I feel I belong and that I have a duty. Is that Cora? It is. Greetings, my name is Kura and I am a Māori marine ecologist from Aotearoa, New Zealand.
So, Connor Paul Burke is a marine scientist, but this wasn't the career that was in her mind until much, much later in her life. Okay, so what was her early lifeline? So Cora told me that she grew up in a small inland town in New Zealand in the 1970s, so nowhere near the ocean, and her ancestors did actually come from these coastal regions. But at the time, Kura said growing up as a Maori child was really hard. To be Maori was to be invisible.
was to be, oh I'm getting emotional, I don't even know why, but to be Māori was to be not seen, not heard, and you are dirty, dumb. and lazy. Everything bad was to be Māori so my mother put me into ballet lessons and I actually loved it. It was discipline, hard work and strength. But I was a new Māori girl in the class. and She asked if some of the other mothers could do my hair. I had really long, really beautiful long hair. And I could hear all the non-Māori mothers talking about me.
saying that I must have head lice, that I was dirty and no one wanted to do my hair. For adults to be saying that about a child, that's awful. I know, like, treat you completely differently to how they're treating the other children. But Kura said, even though this was a really hard time in her life, All of this treatment made her super resilient. I think from there comes our resilience. You put your head down, you work hard, and I think what it's done for me is there's a drive.
There's a knot in my poku, in my stomach, to normalise our ways of knowing, being and doing as real, as meaningful and appropriate. That's incredibly impressive to me that she can take so much... you know strength and resilience from such a terrible experience yeah like from some of their hardest times was you know, develop this huge strength of character which has gone on to massively help her in her life.
And her life, of course, led her on to science. How did she become interested in science? Yeah, so it wasn't at school. She said science was not her favourite subject at all. But outside the classroom, something did catch her eye. I think I was maybe 10 or 11 or maybe even 12. and I was in the town centre.
there was a white microscope in the shop window. And you know when you're a child and you see something that you really like and you kind of walk really slowly past the the shop window the storefront and you drag your fingers along the window like you almost caress the window as a way of saying i want that microscope i've never even seen a microscope before i looked at it with love
And the reason, I think, was I already was in love with the natural world and trying to understand it, and I guess that's science. That speaks to me as someone who wanted to be a scientist when I was younger. You don't even really understand it, but you crave. being able to see things close up, to see things in more detail, to understand things better. It's almost like a portal to unlock in the world. That's what she's looking at, like, if I get that.
then I'll be able to get to the next level of really understanding what's going on. So Kura went to university and still had this curiosity about science, but she was told really nicely that she wasn't smart enough to do science subjects. Wow, I really just... hate this idea that science is for this kind of elite class yeah exactly i think it's you know being told oh you're not smart enough to do this thing it's like well maybe it's just not being taught in the right way
And that's how Kura feels now. So she goes out on her boat and she takes a lot of young Maori people out with her for like marine projects. And she says she turns everything on that boat into science, even something like who can make the biggest splash when they jump off the boat. That's such a good idea. I mean, that is physics. Surface area speed. So, how did Currer get to be a marine scientist if she wasn't actually allowed to do science?
Yeah, it was a very long journey so she ended up studying early years education and went into working with children. She really loves being around young people and then she met her now husband who is a keen diver. And it was one day, years later, when Cora's husband took her out to Fakari Island, which is a home dive site of one of her tribes.
There's something hatter. I think I was pregnant at the time with our fifth child of five children. So he had been spearfishing for our whanau, for our family. and I was flapping around on the surface, snorkelling, because I didn't know how to dive properly. And we were coming back from the ocean, and I sat there and I thought, this is what I want to do. This actually is what I've always wanted to do. I've always wanted to be with the ocean. Best decision I've ever made.
That was her calling to help the ocean. Exactly. So, 39 years old, with five children, the youngest being only eight months old, Cura enrolled to study marine sciences at university. I admire that so much. five children and going to school and being, I'm guessing, in a class of like...
19 year olds when you're 39 yeah but Cora actually said the 19 year olds were wonderful classmates to be around again she just loves being with young people and she was of course doing what she really wanted which was studying the ocean But she noticed that something was missing. There was nothing Māori. There was only ever mainstream science. But if you look at a mainstream science approach to understanding the natural world,
Compared with an indigenous or Māori approach, both approaches aim to better understand the world in which we live. The challenge was keeping my self-love and my self-identity and finding spaces where our indigenous knowledge So was she able to bring Mary Learnings into her degree? She was. So it was her final year research project and she did this in 2007. And when she was trying to figure out, you know, what can I actually do? What should I focus on?
She decided, I'm going to go to my tribal elders in the Bay of Plenty region in New Zealand. And just to picture this, this is a stretch of coast along the North Island. And it is basically... Paradise, it's the white sands, crystal blue waters, but this is where Kura's ancestors originally came from. That's such a great way to find a problem to solve. They will have really good local knowledge.
and also historical knowledge as well that's been passed down i assume yeah exactly so she wanted to solve a real issue that was impacting her community okay and what problem did they give her Green-lipped mussels. One of our harbours is called Ohiwa Harbour in Whakatane. And the green-lipped mussel population, it's a bivalve shellfish, had dropped dramatically and nobody knew why. So my project was to find out how many muscles do we have and why are they disappearing?
And from a Māori perspective, those mussels are taonga, culturally treasured species, because they have sustained our people through generations and all the practices around how we harvest those species and eat them, prepare them, etc. That knowledge survived colonisation. Okay, this is much more than just some shellfish, then. The cultural significance of this species made this way more important.
So did Cora end up finding out what was causing the decline? She did. It turned out to be a pesky predator. There were mussels present, they just weren't on the sea floor. And the reason they weren't on the sea floor is because we had 1.2 million sea stars. and they were just devouring the mussels. When you saw them, I was diving, and there were four to six layers on top of each other. Behind them, nothing but dead mussel shell, and in front of them, lunch. That has actually made me shiver.
the thought of like a wall of hungry starfish oh I'm not sleeping tonight that's horrible yeah it's not something I'd ever think of being like a horrific image but as Cora described it I was like Now, if I was diving and saw that, I'd be out the water. I don't know. I've seen a picture of a... Have you ever seen a picture of a starfish's mouth?
before it's actually quite scary so imagining like a whole wall of those is actually terrifying thank you but how much did the starfish actually impact the muscles numbers A lot. So she started monitoring them during this undergraduate project in 2007. At that time there were 112 million muscles. in a just under two kilometre stretch. It was a reef of mussels. And by 2019, that mussel bed had disappeared, as had two others. There used to be four traditional mussel beds.
By 2019 there was only one left and 80,000 mussels in the entire harbour. Wow, that is quite a significant impact. So had people actually tried fixing this before? Yeah, like loads of people because muscles equals money. But these methods weren't successful. So, knowing lots of people had tried and failed before her, what did Kura want to test to see if she could help restore the populations?
So this is where it gets really interesting because she decided to take a leap away from what Some might deem standard methods and instead combine her knowledge of marine science from her degree with her Maori culture to craft a plan which might just work. You're listening to Unstoppable for Discovery on the BBC World Service, the programme exploring the backstories of some of the most innovative brains on the planet.
And today we're hearing how marine ecologist Kura Paul-Beck is helping to solve some of the problems facing our oceans. Kura found her calling to study the ocean after swimming off the coast of Fakari Island in New Zealand, where her Maori ancestors had died for generations. And, after being told she wasn't smart enough to do science at school, Kura went to university for a second time later in life to become a marine ecologist.
And Julia just said that Kura was hatching a plan to save the green-lipped mussel populations in the Bay of Plenty based on her marine studies and Maori heritage. Yes, and so she actually came across something on a walk one day. That would really change this situation. Our ancestors used, we call it te kouka, and it's a cabbage tree kōrā in Australia.
cabbage tree and their leaves are really, really resilient. We used the dead cabbage tree leaves that had fallen to the ground to make our own mussel spat line. spat lines I'm guessing this is like ropes that mussels can grow on yeah so they're used in mussel farming and normally they're made of of course plastic and Kuro wanted to see if the lines made of natural materials instead
might help to restore the muscles in this region. Okay, now it's better for the environment too, so a win-win if it works out. But how do you actually make a muscle spat line from leaves. Yeah, it's not really a leaf I'd make if I saw a leaf on the ground and thought, oh, I'm going to make a spat line from those. But these leaves can also be used to make baskets.
So Kura turned to traditional weaving methods that are used in basket creation to make robust, steady, water-resistant lines. And she credits this idea to her Maori ancestresses. So I was diving in the harbour one day and I looked up at the land surrounding the harbour and I thought of Hinete Iwiwa. Hinete Iwiwa is an ancestress and her domains are childbirth and weaving. And I was in the harbour and the female ancestors for the ocean is named Moana.
I came up and I was just floating on the surface, waiting for the boat, looking at the land around the harbour and being in the water. I can't explain how it came together, but it just made sense. If you want to restore population, you need to get pregnant and have babies. So would you not then call on the ancestors? and then if she is also the ancestors of weaving would you not then look at
traditional weaving methods to maybe help that childbirth in the domain of any moana of the ocean. But for over a decade, I never talked about my mātauranga Māori, which means Māori knowledge, Māori science with mainstream marine science. She never told anyone for a decade. Why? So Cora said she thought there would be stigma attached to her thinking like this.
and using Maturanga Maori or Maori knowledge to solve what could be seen as like a science problem. And I'm not surprised because she is currently only one of a handful of Maori marine scientists in the entire country.
It is so important in all areas of science to have different voices and different views to generate new and fresh ideas, to not just be trapped in an echo chamber. Yeah, and she's in this situation where lots of other... sort of approaches have been tried so actually like taking a step back and thinking about the environment how it all works and using that knowledge that's been passed down for hundreds of years that could be a different approach.
So once Curra had the lines, what did she do? Well, Curra wanted to compare how well these lines could restore muscle populations. But there were a few other factors she had to take into account before running the trial. What were they? So there were two things.
where she should place them and when. And by when do you mean like the timing of the day or the time of the month, the year? Yeah, the year. So which season would be best to place these things in the water to make the project most effective. And for this... She looked to her surroundings. We deployed our lines in Maipuku.
when my stomach told me it was right. And you're going to say, that's not very scientific. And how do I emulate and replicate that? Because my stomach would tell me the time to put the lines in the water to deploy them. when the harbour became noisy. And the harbour became noisy when certain birds were turned from migrating. And then I would also know that when the pilot whales or the orca would come into the harbour, you had missed the window.
So she's literally looking at the animals and their patterns. That's so interesting. So when a certain population of bird gets super loud, That tells her about the conditions of the water. Exactly. And this, again, is part of Maturanga Maori. So Maori knowledge, wisdom, education, methods and ways of knowing. And they've been tested and passed down over a thousand years. Okay, so time sorted.
But you also mentioned another factor, where. Yeah, so where exactly she should put the muscle lines in the harbour. I'm guessing this isn't the right answer, but wouldn't she just put them where the populations currently were?
she could do that but this might actually not be like the most effective place you know we've caused a lot of changes to the oceans over time so these muscles could have moved from a more optimal condition to the place where we see them now right right okay that makes sense so how did you figure out where the more optimal place was. Once again she went and spoke to her tribal elders.
Nobody knows an environment better than the home people, place-based knowledge. And the reason they know it better is because it feeds and sustains their families through generations. So we started with our tribal elders. And we took them out on the boat and asked them when they were young, where did you used to go to get your green lip muscles? So they gave us a picture of the past.
That's incredible. So she managed to get a generations-old map of where muscles had been in the area purely through conversation. She did, and actually years later, this placement was verified by Modern Method. We worked with some fabulous people, including modelers. And so they took a lot of data and they drew up models of where would be the best place to restore muscles.
and the models identified the exact spaces that our tribal elders had identified. It must feel incredibly satisfying to have that knowledge. verified by modern science. yeah it's like hundreds of years worth of individuals going collecting muscles to sustain their family like they know where those places are so yeah Super interesting that she was able to actually verify that with like sort of a modern scientific approach.
So she ended up laying these woven lines in the pinpointed areas and then ended up monitoring the number of muscles over time. And what happened? This. The lines were amazing. So we had a 2019 one muscle bed lift. By 2021, we had three muscle beds and 800,000 muscles on the seafloor. Then in 2023, the same muscle bed that my daddy took me to as a child to collect muscles. and in 2009 had completely disappeared has returned with 16 million muscles and as recent as
December 2024, that bed now has just under 45 million muscles. Made me cry. Wow, that... I know. I know. And this is when people have Tried, failed before. So tapping into this past knowledge, combining it with marine science, by a scientist who knows that harbour, like the back of her hand, has led to this huge success.
I feel like we can all learn from this. Like with climate change, there will be people with traditional knowledge or people who really know their local area and their voices should be heard. Yeah, I think that, you know, there are people who have trodden on the footpaths of... the land that they're currently living on.
tens, hundreds, thousands of times, they know that land almost like subconsciously like their brain is just taking it in and they will be the ones to spot these differences that no one else could really spot it's so so underestimated what local people's knowledge can actually achieve But back to Kura, is this method with the muscles being used more widely now? It is. So Kura has helped set up the lines and she's also involved in lots of other projects.
Some people are using the lines in freshwater to help eels, we call them tuna, so that they can migrate upstream to procreate and then go back out to sea. And we do all of this for free. If our people call, we just go and help them. That's brilliant. I love that she just goes and helps anyone who asks. Yeah, she said, like, this is the reason she trained as a scientist. It's to give back to Maori communities and help protect and restore their homes.
And one last thing is that with all Courage Projects, she put a really big emphasis on communication. So how can we get the word out that people should really care about this? And I mean, Loving Muscles is a bit of a harder sell than like Save the Turtles. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, I mean, the cute factor is maybe a little bit less. Yeah. So for this project, Kura invited a Maori artist out on her boat.
and they wrote a poem to encapsulate what it was all about. And at the end of a conference, Cora was at when she was talking about this work, the poet actually got off. and read this poem out and everyone in the conference gave it a standing ovation. So I wondered if you wanted to hear some of it, please. Okay, this is the last verse of the poem. First, we're going to hear it in Maori, and then translate it into English.
He atua, he tipua, he kaiwhaka oram, he kaiwhaka mate, he tauranga, he kainga, tāku moana e horanai e. Ko ohiwa e. It always makes me want to cry because that's my uhiwa. That's my heart of my people and of my grandchildren tomorrow. And it translates too. She is godly. She is ancient. She is the giver and taker of life. She is safe harbour. She is home. This harbour that lays before us our ohewa.
That's really beautiful. That actually made me tear up a little bit. I know me too. I know. When I heard it for the first time, I was like tearing up and I still am now. but that is how the Maori ancestress of weaving and childbirth and the Maori ancestress of water came together with modern science to restore part of New Zealand's oceans. So after hearing all of that amazing work, what are your thoughts, Ella?
Gosh, there's a lot to take in there. I mean, Kura has really proven just how important traditional knowledge can be. Traditional knowledge around the world is looked down upon. for not being as valid and it's sad that you know It took her so long to say that this is where a lot of her knowledge had come from because she felt ashamed of it. When, of course, of course that knowledge is going to be impactful and important because
It's literally a history of the earth around you. It's observations. It's science. And I'm just incredibly, incredibly happy that... She feels comfortable and proud to talk about this more openly now. Yeah. And, you know, hopefully it's assigned to other people who have all of this knowledge that they can use it to in a way to really help the planet and to not have.
stigma and shame around that. And on the whole, Cura believes that Indigenous knowledge is going to be absolutely key to helping us save our oceans. I think of the ocean as can say your child was unwell. Would you not travel the world looking to heal your baby? Would you care? What color the skin was of the person who could or the people who had the knowledge to help your baby? Would you care what language they spoke, what clothes they wore?
All you would care is that they had the tools and methods and that they were ethical. That's all you would care about. So why wouldn't we scour the world for different knowledge systems to help us heal our world for our collective grandchildren tomorrow? Kia ora. I kind of love the idea of seeing the ocean as our child and we should be doing everything in our power, going to every possible person to do that. Exactly.
Well, that brings this episode of Unstoppable to a close. Join us next week to hear about a world-renowned cancer scientist who started her days herding sheep in the mountains of Lesotho in order to get an education during apartheid salvation.