You’re browsing our website through an endangered-species exhibit. The tuatara on the homepage is real. So is its conservation status, and so are the other five. We could have shipped a normal agency site. We couldn’t bring ourselves to do it.
The studio takes its name from the wild, so the site pays rent on it. Every animal in the exhibition carries its real story — and every story below ends with a link to people actually doing something about it.
The species
Fact-checked against the NZTCS
None of these animals are mascots. The population counts are real, the threat tiers are the official NZTCS ones, and we fact-check them. A cute drawing of a dying species felt worse than no drawing at all.
~50Māui dolphins left on Earth
Māui dolphin
Popoto · Critical
The world's rarest marine dolphin lives only off the North Island's west coast. The last count, in 2021, put them at 54; a new survey is running now to see whether that number has held. Set nets and trawl fishing remain the biggest threat.
18%of the Hauraki Gulf is now protected from bottom trawling — up from 6%
Marine life
Mangō-taniwha & everything in the water
Our shark is an ode to everything in the water. Great whites have been legally protected since 2007 and still die in set nets and trawls. The 2025 Hauraki Gulf Act tripled seafloor protection from about 6% to 18% — real progress — but bottom trawling is still legal across most of the Park, and the fight to end it is happening right now.
The long-tailed bat is one of just two land mammals that were here before people, and it's Nationally Critical — the same threat tier as the kākāpō. Predator control is slowly flipping the decline, and community groups keep finding colonies no one knew about.
Our only native venomous spider, significant in Māori tradition, lives in one place: coastal dunes — and more than 70% of them have been lost to development and erosion. Restore the coast and the katipō survives. It's that direct.
The tuatara's order arose over 240 million years ago — before the dinosaurs. Every other member is extinct, and introduced rats nearly finished the job on the mainland. The sanctuaries are working, though: in 2025, tuatara returned to a fenced South Island sanctuary after more than a century away.
Rediscovered in the Murchison Mountains in 1948, fifty years after the world gave up on it. Decades of recovery work later there are around 500, and they're being released into new wild valleys. Proof that none of this is hopeless.
If you protect Aotearoa’s wildlife, we want to hear from you.
Awareness is already part of the studio’s week. Brooke runs conservation collabs on our Instagram, our Field Notes cover ethical AI and conservation initiatives across our socials, and we’re signed-up supporters of a handful of organisations doing the real work.
The next step is bigger. We’d love to work with New Zealand’s animal and conservation organisations directly — whether you’re Forest & Bird-sized, the Endangered Species Foundation, or a two-person predator-control trust. Awareness campaigns, fundraising tools, interactive education — the kind of thing this exhibition proves we’ll build with our whole chest.
