The infamous Mount Mauler is back and busy nipping at beachgoers this month, as it does every January. But mystery still surrounds this tricky little creature.
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Is it microscopic jellyfish, nasty sea lice, or as bug expert Ruud Kleinpaste suspects, midges hanging out with sunbathers on the beach?
He tells Jesse Mulligan he hopes local schools can get involved by designing nature projects to find out once and for all what the culprit is.
“This belongs really to New Zealand’s big myths and big mysteries, I suppose," he says. "People go into the water and they get bitten by things and because they’re in the sea, they say they’re sea lice.”
He’s not convinced though. There’s the possibility of something land-based biting people, with the saltwater causing bites to be aggravated when people go swimming, Kleinpaste says.
“The point is we really don’t know."
Kleinpaste thinks the most plausible theory at the moment is the biter being a type of midge, Leptoconops myersi.
“These things do something extraordinary, they live in brackish water in little estuaries and they particular genus actually needs vertebrae blood for reproduction, a little bit like flies and mosquitos," he says.
“The thing then is, that creature – we don’t have many biting midges in New Zealand. In Australia, they’re quite common.
“These things basically look for blood and they’ll find it usually from sunbathers who are at the low-tide mark and above the high-tide mark. You might not be able to feel them.”
He recommends people should take note of the bites, snapping quality photos of them so experts can analyse them.
"You can also go into the sea with an acqautic net in Mount Maunganui. I mean, for crying out loud, sweep the net in the water and see what you catch. Why hasn’t anyone done that yet," he says.
One other theory he is open to is microscopic jellyfish.
Kleinpaste is encouraging schools to get involved to solve the mystery, by directing science projects to pick up evidence of who the blood-thirsty culprit is.
“I think that that would be so cool, to actually solve this now, once and for ever, because every year, mid-January, guess what?”
Many aspects of natural world have not been looked at and research and this mystery is just one of them, he says.
“That’s what we really need to look at. We live in a natural, biological world and whether we like it or not, we need to get on with that world, because we share the planet with it.
He has wider training schemes planned with teachers who want to do lead nature projects with children.
“This is the sort of stuff that I thought is absolutely inspirational, to work with teachers on learning development, but also with kids. Let’s go into the dunes with a net and catch what we can find and maybe we find a new species."