Dr Leilani Walker

Dr Leilani Walker has research interests in animal behaviour and the relationships of New Zealanders with native flora and fauna.

This scientist profile is one of six featured in this group of resources that explore animal ethics with a kaupapa Māori approach. A downloadable PDF of the combined scientist profiles is available in both a bilingual and a te reo Māori version.

He mihi

Ko Mākeo te maunga
Ko Waiaua te awa
Ko Ngāti Patumoana te hapū
Ko Te Whakatōhea te iwi
Ko Mataatua te waka
Ko Waiaua te marae
Ko Ruamoko te whare tīpuna
Ko Michael rāua ko Ratana ōku mātua
Ko Leilani Walker tōku ingoa
Nō reira, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa.

Leilani’s work with live animals

Leilani works as an academic in Environmental Science at Auckland University of Technology (AUT). Her background in behavioural ecology research involves working with live animals by using them in experiments or making observations of their behaviour in their natural environments in the field. Her work is focused on terrestrial invertebrates such as insects and spiders.

Currently I am preparing to do research on the behaviour and populations of land crabs, which are not insects by taxonomy but are still terrestrial invertebrates. I am also still working on natural history collections of endemic spiders – both the specimens themselves as well as the metadata associated with the collection.

Dr Leilani Walker

Leilani always wanted to be a marine biologist and credits this to wanting to follow in her father’s footsteps. As a child, her family summer holidays were spent at the beach with their friends, the Peters family, when they would fish, look in rock pools and dig about in the sand to find mud crabs. Being in that environment inclined her towards biology, with added motivation from her father.

[My dad] knew specific things and could talk to us, not just about the science, he would tie that back into Māori knowledge, so he’d talk about navigation, migratory birds and telling signs from them. He’d talk about the way that different animals could read the tides and things like that.

Dr Leilani Walker

After finishing school, Leilani went straight to university and completed a conjoint BA/BSc degree then a Bachelor of Science (Honours). Almost by chance, one semester, she enrolled in an entomology (study of insects) paper with a convenient timetable. She says, “Once I took that paper, I basically didn’t want to do anything else.”

After completing her Honours degree, she went and worked for a year before returning to enrol in a PhD. For her doctorate, she studied the evolution of exaggerated male anatomy in native sheetweb spiders, using a mixture of behavioural observations and close examinations of that anatomy to answer questions about how males compete with each other for access to potential mates. After finishing her doctorate, one of Leilani’s first jobs was at the Auckland War Memorial Museum, where her focus enlarged to also include working with secondary data from natural history collections of terrestrial invertebrates.

Influence of te ao Māori on Leilani’s work

Two Māori concepts that Leilani relates to working with animals are ngā atua and mana. Leilani recalls childhood experiences of summer holidays.

When we went fishing as a group, my grandfather [Ranginui Walker] would do karakia before we started fishing as he was throwing the bait out. And as I said, my father always talked about navigating by birds and by stars and how the animals do it. So there was always this sense of parallel process from Māori knowledge and the experiences of animals – there was a really strong sense of connection there.

Dr Leilani Walker

Ethics and invertebrates

Interestingly, in biology, there is no requirement for any kind of ethics for terrestrial invertebrates, with the exception of mud crabs. For the others, scientists do not need to go through any process of ethics sign-off to work on them and do anything to them. Mud crab species are given the status of requiring animal ethics approval because they have been shown by scientific studies to feel pain.

In Western thinking, invertebrate animals have traditionally been considered unable to feel pain and thus unprotected under animal ethics provisions. In some cases, these creatures are not actually classed as animals under the Wildlife Act 1953 and therefore not subject to legal protection or animal ethics oversight.

Māori knowledge extends to all living things the dignity of whakapapa wherein they are recognised as having mana as descendants of ngā atua. Atua are guardians, narratives, symbols and theories of nature. Atua narratives and the related concepts (whakapapa, mana, tapu, tika, pono and aroha) play an analogous role in underpinning Māori thinking as do scientific paradigms of knowledge for Western thinking.

Ngā atua was an important concept in my childhood, and I’ve heard it reiterated many times that, when we karakia to Tangaroa, it’s not that Tangaroa is god of the ocean – Tangaroa is the ocean. That was my experience of ngā atua growing up, but I think it’s something people have difficulty with, particularly those trained only in Western sciences.

Dr Leilani Walker

Linnaean taxonomy, encompassing entomology, is not place based. Taxonomy assumes there is a global evolutionary tree – in which fits every species in the world. The concept of a beetle is universal. It has no relationship to, say, the beetle that lives in a garden. In contrast, mātauranga Māori knowledge is about the thing not so much in and of itself but in its place, its context.

Some alignment can be drawn between taxonomy and whakapapa. Comparisons can be made in as much as both involve relationships and because, for example, how evolution originates from pedigree charts. But in conceptions of whakapapa, mauri is going in both directions whereas, in evolution, it’s unidirectional. Whakapapa entails an inherently ethical dimension in Māori systems of knowledge of animals whereas there is no such provision within evolutionary theory.

The way I was raised, collecting kaimoana and generally looking after the estuary that we stayed on, makes me think about mana. Mana explains why we were taught not to take more than you need, to treat animals with dignity, so we would get very angry with people who left nets out in the estuary for multiple days so things get caught in them and die. I’m thinking of those animals as having their own mana, which must not be trampled on.

Dr Leilani Walker