Koura Kraze

Where are all the koura?

Granny Eva remembers exploring the local stream when she was a girl and being delighted to find koura, those little crawlies. When she took her grandchildren to the stream over Christmas, they couldn’t find any. None at all. Granny wonders where they’ve gone and why. Are there any left at all in our New Zealand streams?

So during March, students from schools over the country will search for koura in their local streams during Koura Kraze.

Photo: Stephen Moore Landcare Research

Let us know what you think of our koura pictures by emailing rebecca.goffin@rsnz.org and we will send you a koura fridge magnet!

What is Koura Kraze?

We’d like to compile a map of New Zealand showing where the students have found koura during March. The aim is for students to become involved and engaged in learning that will be of national scientific significance and useful to the research community.

This information will become part of a range of data collected during March Monitoring Month to look at the health of our national waterways.

All the resources and background information you need can be found on this site
Koura Kraze is appropriate for all levels, from early childhood to tertiary.
Prizes will be awarded.

What does participation involve?

Participation in the project need not involve a lot of effort on your part. The degree of involvement depends entirely on you and can range from simply observing whether or not there are any koura in a waterway to taking a range of other stream quality measurements while you are there. You could do this as a class visit to the stream - perhaps as a beginning of the year shared lunch down by your local waterway, taking the time while you are there to look for koura. Alternatively you could set this as a homework activity for your students to do individually, in groups or with their family during March. Others may want to run Koura Kraze as a full research unit on stream health.

Whatever you choose to do, this website will give you all the information and resources you need.

Prizes

Click here to see what prizes you can win, thanks to the Ministry for the Environment, Scitech NZ and the New Zealand Water and Wastes Association.

There is over $6000 worth of prizes to be won!

Koura Conservation

Why do we need to know about the Koura?

Koura are endemic to New Zealand. They are in gradual decline and are listed as a threatened species.
Koura are an indicator species. They can only live in water which is not heavily degraded. They are also very easily recognisable.

Why participate in Koura Kraze?

To challenge our students to think about their degrading environment and empower them with the skills to mitigate this. This ‘participating and contributing’ clearly links to the key competencies of the revised curriculum.
To engage students in the process of ecological research.
To develop scientific skills in a meaningful, real world context.
To provide students with an opportunity to contribute to a growing national database (to which you and your students will have access).

What to do?

1. Read the background information on koura.

2. Obtain ethics approval for Koura Kraze in your local waterway.

3. Decide whether you would like to run Koura Kraze as:

4. Enter your data on our online form to go into the draw to win prizes for your school

Click here to view Koura Kraze results on a Map...

A strength of this project is that it provides an ideal opportunity to teach your students about the research process itself – in a meaningful context. This meets requirements in both the current and the new draft curriculum. So even if you decide to run Koura Kraze as a homework activity or class excursion, we suggest you look over the research unit and perhaps pick and choose portions you would like to incorporate. Since the project will be looking at streams nationally, the usefulness of the data will be increased as more sampling is done.