Professor David Farrier

So when he was about to depart, they gave each other gifts.

The whale gave the tree his scaly skin so it had a bark to protect it.

And the tree gave the whale oil to ease his way through and protect his skin in the salty water.

Several decades ago, kairi trees were attacked by this fungus that's causing this tremendous problem of kairi dieback.

You know, we have ash dye back here.

It's a fungus and there's not really been a solution for it.

And at one point, Māori healers noticed that southern right whales were beaching themselves on the shores of Eche Row and they said the whale is coming back to help his brother.

And they realised that creating a compound, or they found that creating a compound was

of the bones of southern right whales allowed them to kind of apply an ointment to these trees that had a positive effect on the fungus.

Now it's not been kind of proven by scientific studies yet, it's still anecdotal you might say, but the point Marcus was trying to make to me was that the point there is that the whale and the tree

have a shared whakapapa, they have a shared relationship going back into creation.

And from a Maori point of view, if you were to say I was going to edit this tree with parts of the genome of the right whale, I would have no problem with that.

Because the question at root is how does this foster a greater sense of relationship?

From a Maori worldview, these entities, these organisms, profoundly different from a Western point of view, are kin.

And

rightly you know whether or not you know we you know any of us are persuaded by the you know the story of the you know the the mario healers or not that's really for me what's at heart is that question it's that re-erting question so if we ever were to do it's just a different way of thinking uh or what is already being done you know there's been a similar project you know to to um help uh american chestnut trees that you know again were blighted by a fungus um

that comes from Japanese chestnut trees, I think, to coexist.

They introduced a wheat enzyme into these trees.

And what it actually did was it allowed the tree not to kind of bite off the fungus, but to coexist with it, which is a total reorientation of thinking about this, that it's a change that's actually fostering a relationship.

As it turns out,