Cam Hoffbeck came to Aotearoa to study native birds but quickly became captured by the tuatara.
The PhD student at Waipapa Taumata Rau - University of Auckland last week won the ‘ultimate elevator pitch’ competition, the Three Minute Thesis (3MT) which pits doctoral and masters students against their peers in delivering the best synopsis of their thesis.
Hoffbeck says it was a tough task, especially being accustomed to speak in the language and jargon peculiar to her field of study, microbiology, but is confident her win now means her family can’t accuse of her underwhelming elevator pitches.
“So it’s really challenging to distil it down into something that both a non-science audience can get behind and appreciate and also that captures everything I’m doing in just three minutes,” she told teaonews.co.nz
Hoffbeck arrived in Aotearoa in 2020 on a Fulbright Scholarship, originally with the intention of studying native birds. But after seeing the uniqueness of the tuatara, her thesis is now looking into how the microbiome of the ancient fossil can be used to ensure its survival.
Different gut microbiome
“We find that a lot of times when animals move into captivity, they have a different gut microbiome from in the wild. If we can imagine for humans, I’m sure everyone has had the experience of taking antibiotics, and how you feel a little ill afterwards and have to eat some yoghurt usually to restore that community. So the same thing can be happening when we move these animals into captivity or into these sanctuaries.
“So we want to understand if the tuatara on Takapourewa (Stephens Island), which is where 90% of their population lives, have similar communities to those tuatara that have been moved to various sanctuaries around New Zealand or into captivity in the zoos.”
She says understanding how the microbiome, the collection of genomes, genes and gene products of the microbiota living in a given environment including animal stomachs, could be critical in understanding how tuatara can be protected from climate change and the dangers it poses to the natural habitat of the pre-historic creature.
“Tuatara are really lucky that their lifestyle has protected them from the changing climate to a large extent. All reptiles are really impacted as being cold-blooded. The temperature of the air affects them a lot more than us - they can’t sweat or anything like that to cool off.”
What’s a tuatara?
Tuatara regulate their temperature by burrowing underground, only emerging to capture the warmth from the sun, and also keep their eggs underground to protect from the heat. Hoffbeck says that has kept them safe, compared to other reptiles but rising temperatures could spell danger.
“Tuatara are very cold-adapted. They lived all throughout Aotearoa back before introduced mammalian predators, so they are definitely at the upper range of their thermal tolerance in parts of Aotearoa, especially in the north. So we want to be aware of that and understand how we can best protect them.”
The 3MT victory at Waipapa Taumata Rau now means Hoffbeck will represent the university at the Asia-Pacific competition, where she says would be a tougher proposition to convince an international audience of the importance of protecting a reptile endemic to Aotearoa.
“When I was in the US I had actually never heard of tuatara until I came here the first time. So I think now that I know everything about them - I think anyone who’s seen one or knows them would know that they’re really important and need to be conserved - but I do think for an international audience I might need to make the case a little more of why tuatara are so special.”
