Professor Carolyn (known as Kim) King is New Zealand’s foremost authority on invasive mammals and world-renowned for her contribution to ecology – especially mustelids – stoats, weasels and ferrets.
Dr King received a Lifetime Achievement Award for her work in biological sciences at the 2010 Kudos Awards. View the interview HERE:
She also holds the Mammal Society Medal (2005) and the NZES Award (1999); and was a Research Associate in the Department of Philosophy, Waikato University, until 2017.
Senior Editor, New Zealand Journal of Zoology.
Contact Details
Email: cmking@waikato.ac.nz
Room: R.2.17
Phone: +64 7 837 9389
Research:
– Ecology of small rodents and mustelids, especially stoats and weasels.
– Philosphy and management of national parks.
– Traditional and contemporary relationships between science and theology.
Creation and Theology
In addition to her conservation research and work, Kim King has also been active as an author and theologian in the Anglican Church promoting care for creation.
She currently produces regular articles and newsletter-insert pieces called ‘God Talk’ for the Hamilton Cathedral. View here
“we have begun offering a series of five-minute theological think-pieces, as regular contributions to the weekly pew sheets. The series started with a group of discussion ideas on the theology of creation from a scientist. Later items came from parishioners sharing other view points from their different experiences of life and faith as lawyers, linguists, administrators, soldiers and mothers.”
Also on the God Talk web page: A 6-part study series on Theology of Creation.
Radio Interview with Jesse Mulligan, 2:30 pm on 18 May 2020
Listen to a recording of Dr CM King’s Radio New Zealand National interview with journalist Jesse Mulligan HERE
Exerpt from Interview:
She began her career in Oxford, and was studying weasels in 1971, when she was asked to come and help us get rid of stoats in New Zealand.
She wrote the first ever book on predators in New Zealand Immigrant Killers in 1984 and then The Handbook of New Zealand Mammals (1990), she’s is now working on the third edition.
But her most recent published book is called Invasive Predators in New Zealand – Disaster on Four Small Paws.
She told Jessie Mulligan the country’s goal of being predator free by 2050 was terrific, but the technological means of achieving it didn’t seem to exist. That wasn’t to say the means wouldn’t be attained as efforts to eradicate pests continued.
In her experience rats were far more numerous in forests and more of a problem that stoats, which were more of a particular problem to some fauna species. Two species of rats dominated the landscape in New Zealand – large Norway rats, which live in sewers and around dumps, and ship rats, which live in forests and can climb into trees and kill off bird populations.
Ferrets live in open country endangering lizards and bird nests on ground. Weasels, being smaller and unable to tackle bigger native species, have not proliferated around the country as much as stoats. All of these pest species needed to be tackled in unison, as removing one species would just benefit the other, she says.
“It isn’t enough to just to remove a few predators like possums, rats and stoats, there are other things that come in and take over when those disappear and in the meantime there are other things like herbivores destroying the forest, the trouble is you just can’t change only one thing.
“All of those animals belong to an interconnected community, you tweak one corner of it and something happens in another corner.”
King says this is observed when farmers get rid of possums, only to find a subsequent major increase in rats.
“Possums are bigger than rats and they compete with them for food and it’s always to the rats’ advantage when the possums have gone.”
To deal with these populations effectively would involve a huge effort, employing tactics and technology other than just dropping poisons across vast tracts of land.
One option is the use of gene drives – a type of genetic engineering technique that modifies genes so that they don’t follow the typical rules of heredity. Gene drive technology dramatically increases the likelihood that a particular gene being passed onto the next generation, allowing the genes to rapidly spread through a population and override natural selection. Using the technology can cause extinction.
It’s a technology that offers options, but King is hesitant to give it her approval, due to the inherent risks involved.
“I am very concerned about the possibility of people getting carried away by genetic modification. There’s a lot of talk about gene drives, modified genes that can be introduced to a population. They’re trying some in Australia for example with the Daughterless Carp Program and these are fish that can produce sons but not daughters. So if you have a whole population with one gender, than sooner or later the population will die out, without you having to set traps or poisons.
“So, that’s the aspiration and I’d love to see that happen, but I don’t know that it’s possible yet. The thing that worries me is that a gene drive is something that you release into the general population and after that it becomes self-perpetuating. If it does the job that’s fine, but if it gets out there and it doesn’t do the job you can’t call it back.
“Then we’re into a 21st century mistake that they made in the 19th century bringing stoats in, in the first place, because the guys who brought them in where convinced they were the natural enemies of rabbits. Too many rabbits and their answer was we haven’t got enough stoats. So they brought in more stoats and it didn’t work.
“So the worry is bringing in any self-perpetuating weapon, which is very attractive because you don’t have to put money and manpower into distributing it, may get away from you, doesn’t do want you want it to do and becomes a real threat.”
Radio Interview with Kim Hill, 2020, ‘Carolyn King: small mustelids’, 8:30 am on 9 October 2010. Listen HERE
You began thinking about the relationship between science and theology … why?
“I have been a Christian most of my life, and I could never understand why there was not very much in Christian practice about obligations to the natural world. In 1993 I went into the office of the then Bishop of Waikato, David Moxom, and on the wall was a plaque which listed the five mission statements of the Anglican Church. The first four were the obvious ones, to spread the gospel and look after people and that kind of stuff. And right at the end, the fifth one was ‘To care for creation’. I said to him, “I know what I think that means, but what does the church think it means?” And he said “Well, I don’t know. Perhaps you had better find out.”
At that time I had thought I had got to the end of my active conservation work, and I was thinking about doing some study on theology. Bishop Moxon was enormously encouraging, so I started a Masters project on that question of what that fifth mission statement meant: to care for creation. It turned into a much bigger project, and a second PhD. I mean, nobody needs two PhDs, but it was so interesting I could not stop it.”
Kim Hill: “God made stoats as well as brown kiwi. Is it up to us to keep them apart?”
“No. I don’t think of God as having that sort of active involvement. He does not tune up the blackbirds and paint the flowers. What he has done is to set the conditions to make life possible. What we see is the result of life struggling to make the most of those opportunities, over evolutionary time. It is humans in our mis-management of the world that we have put stoats and kiwis together. They never were and never should have been ever put together.”
Book: ‘Invasive Predators in New Zealand: Disaster on Four Small Paws’