Insect from down under attacking Hawaiian naio

An invasive insect from Australia by way of California is severely damaging one of Hawai`i`s prized native plants, the naio or false sandalwood.

The pest is a thrips, a class of tiny sucking insects that puncture plants and suck their fluids, and which in the process can disfigure and weaken the plants. The bug, Klambothrips myopori, only feeds on species of myoporum, of which naio is one.

(Image: The youngest leaves of the naio and severely disfigured by attacks from the alien thrips pest. Credit: Hawaii Department of Agriculture.)

So far, they are mainly on the Big Island, and naturalists are trying to control their spread.

The start of the Hawaiian naio dilemma is described in a2009 Hawai`i Department of Agriculture paper by Patrick Conant, Clyde K. Hirayama, Monica I. Lee, Cheryl L. Young, and Ronald A. Heu.

The authors note that Hawaiian naio’s young leaves are severely deformed by the thrips.

New Zealand ecologist Jon J. Sullivan outlines the problemin a paper in the journal Biological Invasions.

It all started long ago when a New Zealand relative of the naio, called ngaio in New Zealand and Myoporum laetum to science, was imported to California as an ornamental plant, and then escaped cultivation and became a weed. 

The thrips, a tiny, thin, black,winged insect, doesn’t occur in New Zealand, but does occur in Tasmania, an island south of the continent of Australia, on a different myoporum that presumably tolerates the pest. 

In 2005, the thrips showed up in California, and since then in rapid order it has killed off half the Myoporum laetum in California and has defoliated many of the rest. To Californians worried about the spread of the myoporum, it was considered an inadvertent but fortuitous form of biological control of a weed.

A University of California-Riverside Center for Invasive Species Research outlines the scope of the California problem.

Then in December 2008, it showed up on Hawai`i island. The Hawaiian Myoporum sandwicense is clearly susceptible to the thrips attack.

“Initial indications are that K. myopori populations are also starting a sustained outbreaking in Hawai`i on native, and presumably more genetically diverse, M. sandwicense, and plants are again being defoliated and killed,” Sullivan wrote, citing a report by the state Department of Land and Natural Resources.

The big problem in all this, Sullivan says, is national borders that are “leaky” to biological invasion.

“It is…hard to imagine how it could have been predicted that a previously unknown and uncommon Tasmanian insect would cause a mass dieback of a New Zealand native plant in California,” he said.

Or, for that matter, that the same insect would find a host among the native plants of Hawai`i. 

The Hawaiian naio attack continues and is growing, according to a paper, “Assessing the impacts of an invasive thrips (Klambothrips myopori) infestation on native Myoporum in Hawaii,” by Cynthia King, Robert Hauff, Leyla Kaufman and Mark Wright. They are with the state Division or Forestry and Wildlife and the University of Hawai`i-Manoa Department of Plant and Environmental Protection Sciences.

The Hawai`i Biodiversity Information Network has a websitewith photos and information on how to identify and report the alien invaders. 

Scientists are hoping that natural enemies like small wasps, will help them gain control over the thrips expansion.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2014

The legal challenge to anti-GMO Bill 2491 is filed: details (updated)

The other shoe has dropped in Kaua`i County’s intensely regulation of companies that grow genetically modified crops and use restricted-use pesticides.

Attorneys for three Kaua`i-based seed companies filed suit late Friday, January 11, 2014 , demanding that the Kaua`i County Council’s controversial Bill 2491 be invalidated. Supporters of the bill, which became county Ordinance 960 but is better known by its bill number, argued the court challenge is flawed, but did so without reference to any specific provisions, suggesting they had not reviewed it.

"The chemical industry has been using bullying and misinformation all along to try to derail this law. They consider their impacts on the health of Kauaʻi’s residents as collateral damage. We look forward to defending Kauaʻi’s families and its environment, and are confident justice will prevail," said Earthjustice Managing Attorney Paul Achitoff noted.

George Kimbrell, Senior Attorney with the Center for Food Safety, said “Kauaʻi’s ordinance is a sound and well-crafted law. The industry’s challenge is without merit, and we will vigorously defend it.”

Neither Earthjustice nor the Center for Food safety is a party to the lawsuit.

The seed companies filing the action are Syngenta, Pioneer Hi-Bred and Agrigenetics, which is associated with Dow AgroSciences. The bill also impacted seed company BASF Plant Science which was not listed, and neither was Kauai Coffee, which was regulated by 2491 based on its use of restricted pesticides, not because of genetically modified crops.

The attorneys ask, in an action filed in U.S. District Court in Honolulu, that 2491 be declared in violation of numerous county, state and federal laws, and that the county be prevented from enforcing it.

It is an omnibus complaint, bringing to bear a great mass of argument on behalf of the West Kauai big agriculture companies. It also goes far beyond the Kaua`i County Attorney’s opinion, on which was based Mayor Bernard Carvalho’s overridden veto of 2491.

The legal challenge argues that that the county can’t regulate activities already regulated by state and federal agencies

It argues that 2491 violates the U.S. Constitution by arbitrarily picking on the big agriculture companies, and not anyone else engaged in the same activities.

It argues the bill is a violation of Equal Protection provisions in imposing restrictions and penalties without what it calls a legal or factual basis.

It says the bill effectively condemns property without compensation, a “taking,” by preventing agricultural companies from growing crops on land within buffer zones. 

It also says that the Council was able to override a mayoral veto only after, in violation of state law, selecting a new Council member favoring the override.

The complaint argues that the bill violates the county charter provision that an ordinance be about just one thing. It is perhaps the simplest of the arguments. The charter says: “every ordinance shall embrace but one subject, which shall be expressed in its title.” But 2491 quite clearly embraces two, as expressed in its title, which cites pesticides AND genetically modified organisms.

It argues that the county can’t regulate pesticides, since “the Hawai`i Pesticides Law exclusively and uniformly governs the use of pesticides throughout the state.”

It says genetically modified crop can’t be harshly regulated in the absence of any hard evidence of harm.

It says the state’s “Right to Farm Act” prevents agencies from declaring any farming operation a nuisance if it has been operated in accordance with law and generally accepted agricultural practices.

It says 2491 requires disclosures that are prohibited by the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act.

It argues that requiring companies to disclose what they’re growing and where puts them at risk of commercial spying as well as vandalism.

“The restrictions imposed by Bill 2491 are not rational,” the lawsuit says. And many of the assertions that form the basis for the 2491 regulation are simply wrong, it says.

There’s lots more in the 70-page complaint. 

A very brief history of 2491: It was launched earlier this year by the Council, accompanied by marches and mass protests over GMOs, pesticides, dust and other issues. It passed the Council but was vetoed by the mayor. 

The Council was one vote short of enough votes to override, but was also one member short due to a job change by a Council member. The majority appointed a new Council member, whose vote provided the last vote required for the override.

The passed version of 2491 is somewhat watered down from the original, but still limits pesticide use in certain areas, requires considerable public disclosure of agricultural activities, sets buffer zones were the impacted companies are prevented from operating, and calls for a major investigation into the impacts of big ag on the island.

Several attorneys for environmental firms or on behalf of bill supporters said they would help defend the county against the anticipated court challenge. But it is not clear whether the county will allow attorneys to work gratis on its behalf, when their interests may not align perfectly with the county's interests.

The county’s additional challenge is to determine how to defend a law that the county attorney’s office declared legally flawed.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2014

University of Hawai`i: Corals record 1,000 years of climate variability

Climate change alters the globe in many ways, and new research by the University of Hawai`i shows that even the deep ocean is changed fundamentally.

(Image: Samples of Hawaiian gold coral Kulamanamana haumeaae, which can live for thousands of years, were collected during a HURL Pisces V submersible dive. The submersible’s robotic arm is visible in the picture. The image is the cover shot on the current issue [Jan. 2, 2014] of the journal Nature. Credit: UH Hawaii Undersea Research Laboratory, DSRV Pisces Pilot Max Cremer.)

The chemical processes in the North Pacific around Hawai`i are showing signs of significant alteration—a change that appears clearly associated with climate change, according to a new paper in Nature.

More about HURL here.

The Hawaii Undersea Research Laboratory (HURL) at the University of Hawaii-Manoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST), working with researchers from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and the University of California-Santa Cruz analyzed deep-sea corals gathered near the Hawaiian Islands using the HURL Pisces V submersible.

By studying the skeletal layers of the slow-growing and very old corals, they were able to assess changes in the nitrogen levels in the ocean. The researchers were able to track changes in the ocean food web over the past 1,000 years from their studies of the ancient corals.

For most of that 1,000 years, the levels bounced around by a small amount. Then, as the Industrial Revolution began changing the makeup of the atmosphere and the Little Ice Age came to an end, the levels changed.

The research showed that nitrogen fixation—the process by which living things take up nitrogen from the atmosphere or water—has increased by roughly 20 percent in the North Pacific over the past roughly 150 years. And it found that the increase is still going on.

"This...has very significant implications about how we understand, and perhaps, can better predict effects of global warming in the Pacific, but also likely in other subtropical regions," Tom Guilderson of LLNL said.

Citation: Increasing subtropical North Pacific Ocean nitrogen fixation since the Little Ice Age. Owen A. Sherwood, Thomas P. Guilderson, Fabian C. Batista, John T. Schiff and Matthew D. McCarthy. Nature, doi:10.1038/nature12784

© Jan TenBruggencate 2014