Amazing upper Wainiha Valley set for protection

The Nature Conservancy of Hawai'i has teamed up with landowner Alexander & Baldwin to actively protect one of the most remote, stunningly beautiful pieces of Hawai'i—the upper Wainiha Valley.

This region, deep in the center of Kaua'i, is protected on all sides except for its streambed by high cliffs. The plunging valleys drop directly to the cold, fast-running Wainiha stream. The only reasonable way to reach the area is via helicopter.

(Photo: This native mint Phyllostegia helleri, once thought extinct, was rediscovered in Wainiha Valley by the photographer, Ken Wood, of the National Tropical Botanical Garden, and the Nature Conservancy's Trae Menard.)

Wainiha is a 12-mile long valley, extending southward from the island's north shore and then taking a dogleg southeast to Wai'ale'ale, the mile-high bog lands at the heart of the island. The protected area includes 5,750 acres representing the half of the valley inland from the dogleg, nearest Wai'ale'ale. The reserve additionally includes 1,300 acres of the Wai'ale'ale summit and the adjacent Alaka'i Swamp plateau.

Upper Wainiha is so isolated that it is the legendary last refuge of the Hawaiian Menehune, the mythical precursors of modern Hawaiians. No one could challenge that there were Menehune in these forested hinterlands, because no one went there.

“The upper region of Wainiha is as close to pristine as any valley system can get in the Hawaiian Islands,” said Sam Gon III, Nature Conservancy senior scientist and cultural advisor.

(Photo: Wainiha Valley, by John De Mello, The Nature Conservancy)

Throughout much of wild Hawai'i, there has for decades been a paradigm of benign conservation—drawing lines around regions on maps and declaring them preserved. That has been the case with upper Wainiha, but its remoteness, not the lines on maps, have protected it—until now.

Conservancy Kaua'i program director Trae Menard cited three new threats to once-pristine Wainiha: the invasive weeds clidemia and Australian tree fern, and wild pigs.

“Australian tree fern is the biggest threat. And it’s urgent, because right now we have a narrow window of opportunity to try to get in there and control it,” Menard said.

He estimated that well within 20 years, it could be dense enough in the valley to shade out much of the native wildlife.

Controlling the invading fern is important because of how much native stuff is still living in this rugged green valley.

Wainiha is so native that most Hawai'i residents would not recognize its wildlife.

Its forests contain 127 species of endemic Hawaiian plants, 41 of them found only on Kaua'i and several of them endangered. They include the native laua'e, the thick-leaved maile-scented fern that adorned hula dancers before it became rare they they resorted to an introduced fern.

In the stream are native gobies and the endangered Newcomb's snail, a tiny aquatic animal that crawls on its rocks.

The trees provide homes for an array of native forest birds, among them the ‘elepaio, ‘apapane, ‘amakihi, ‘akikiki and akeke‘e. And Hawaiian petrels, 'ua'u, nest in the cliffs.

Conservancy executive director Suzanne Case called upper Wainiha “a treasure chest.”

The Wainiha reserve will be the third-largest private nature reserve in the state. A&B will continue to own the land, but under an agreement announced earlier this month, the Conservancy will manage it for a period of 10 years.

A&B Foundation contributed $100,000 to help fund the conservation program.

“Our company has confidence in The Nature Conservancy’s capabilities and we are pleased to partner with them to pursue our common goal of ensuring the protection of this valuable natural resource for generations to come,” said A&B chief executive officer Allen Doane.

One benefit to A&B is that complex native forest is thought to be better watershed than a forest of alien species, A&B uses the water from Waihiha to run the state's largest hydroelectric facility, its Wainiha Hydroelectric Plant.

“Protecting the native forest that is the source of that water helps insure an important renewable source of energy for the future,” Doane said.

© 2007 Jan W. TenBruggencate

Conservancy press release and video: www.nature.org/wherewework/northamerica/states/hawaii/press/press3221.html

Polynesians were in Americas, but left no clear genetic trace

An extensive survey of the genetic makeup of native Americans—north and south—show no markers to indicate Polynesians contributed significantly.

That doesn't mean early Pacific voyagers didn't visit the western coasts of the Americas. There is evidence they did. But it suggests they didn't stay, or at least didn't stay in significant enough numbers to leave a genetic footprint.

(Photo: The Hawaiian-designed voyaging canoe Alingano Maisu, at the dock at Kawaihae, Hawai'i, before crossing the Pacific this year, showing that Polynesian canoes and crews were fully capable of accurate long-distance voyaging. Jan TenBruggencate photo.)

“From these analyses, there is no compelling evidence for a Polynesian contribution to South American genetic variation.

“I am unable to say whether there was admixture that was too limited to be detected by our analysis,” said Cecil M. Lewis Jr., an anthropologist at the University of Oklahoma.

He is one of the main authors of a massive scientific endeavor, which looked at genetic material from native Americans from the Arctic down the southern point of South America, and from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

The paper, “Genetic Variation and Population Structure in Native Americans,” was published this month in the online scientific journal PloS Genetics. The other primary authors are Sijia Wang of University College London's Galton Laboratory, and Mattias Jakobsson, of the University of Michigan's Department of Human Genetics. Two dozen other researchers from around the world also participated.

They took genetic samples from 422 individuals in 24 American native ethnic groups, and conducted detailed studies.

Among their conclusions:

► The Americas were most likely populated in a single colonization event from Siberia across a land bridge through the Bering Strait area. “The lower level of genetic diversity observed in the Americas compared to other continental regions is compatible with a reduction in population size associated with a geographically discrete founding,” the authors wrote.

► But while that's the best guess, “similar patterns could result from gene flow across the Bering Strait in the last few thousand years, together with continual interactions between neighbors on both sides of the Bering Strait.”

► The people of the early Americas are clearly related: “at each step in the migration, a subset of the population splitting off from a parental group moves deeper into the Americas, taking with it a subset of the genetic variation present in the parental population.”

► The habitation of the Americas started down the oceanic coasts, and moved inland later. The western (Pacific) coast of South America was populated before the eastern and Amazon basin areas.

► As you might expect, groups of native Americans with similar languages are generally similar genetically.

Does this work refute suggestions that Polynesians made contact with the Americas? Certainly not. It simply says that Polynesians didn't contribute a great deal to the genetic makeup of the American natives.

Other genetic work shows that Polynesian settlement occurred generally from west to east across the Pacific.

Within the past year, researchers have published genetic work indicating that the chickens found in coastal sites in Chile were the same as the chickens the Polynesians carried across the Pacific. It was the first hard evidence of a Polynesian “thing” in the Americas.

Previously, the American sweet potato has been located throughout the Pacific, but there was no clear proof of how it got there.

Increasingly, the evidence is that Polynesians were such remarkable ocean voyagers that they could readily have conducted back-and-forth voyages across great distances throughout the Pacific.

The most recent evidence of such voyaging was an adze found in the Tuamotu Archipelago, which was made of stone quarried on Kaho'olawe Island in the Hawaiian Archipelago. First, Polynesians needed to voyage to Hawai'i, in the North Pacific, from their South Pacific origins, and then, they had to sail back to deliver the adze stone.

The chickens appear to be proof of at least one voyage east to the Americas, and the sweet potato increasingly appears to be proof of voyaging back west from the Americas. The Kaho'olawe-Tuamotu adze appears to be proof of at least one voyage north to Hawai'i and then south to the Tuamotus.

Future archaeological and genetic work will doubtless provide further proof of frequent voyaging.

One thing the Wang-Lewis-Jakobsson genetic work, combined with other recent work, suggests is that while Polynesians were great voyagers, they tended not to settle in areas that were already inhabited.

© 2007 Jan W. TenBruggencate

See the paper: genetics.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pgen.0030185#aff2

For more information, see previous stories on RaisingIslands.com: raisingislands.blogspot.com/search/label/Archaeology

Fountain grass: Darwin-defying super-weed?

Fountain grass is among the really problem weeds of Hawai'i, but globally, it may be more than a problem weed.

It may, in fact, be a global superweed, violating understood standards of plant behavior.

(Photo: Big Island fountain grass. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service photo by Marie Bruegmann.)

A team of scientists from the University of Hawai'i suggest the grass constitutes a “super-genotype.” They are Johannes Le Roux, Ania Wieczorek and Carol Tran of the university's Department of Tropical Plant and Soil Sciences, and Mark Wright of the Department of Plant and Environmental Sciences.

Their paper, “Super-Genotype: Global Monoclonality Defies the Odds of Nature,” was published this summer on the Public Library of Science's peer-reviewed online journal PLoS ONE.

Fountain grass is a problem in Hawai'i not only because it expands quickly and competes aggressively. It's also a fire fuel and is fire tolerant. That means it helps a fire sweep across the landscape by being readily ignited, and it recovers quickly from fire—often much faster than native plants.

It can be attractive in a garden setting, and has accomplished some of its expansion through escaping from cultivation. It is native to northern Africa. The paper's authors say it is now found, in addition to Hawai'i and the Mainland United States, in Australia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Fiji, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

But it is not equally invasive in each environment. As an example, they say, while it readily invades native forest areas in Hawai'i, it primarily goes into disturbed areas in South Africa and appears to be mainly along roadsides in Namibia.

The authors conducted genetic studies on the grasses, and found that there is amazingly little variability among them. Samples from “South Africa, Namibia, Egypt, Hawaii, Arizona and California share a single genotype.”

And yet, the grasses are growing in remarkably different environments. Highlands and lowlands, wet and dry, and some areas with significant limits on the amount of nitrogen available.

Most plants don't do well when you move them from one environment to a dramatically different one, although if they survive, their offspring after a few generations may evolve the capability to do well in the new situation.

The suggestion of the authors is that the fountain grass has a dramatic inherent ability to respond immediately to new environments, rather than needing to evolve to adapt to new circumstances.

Why would this be the case? They suggest that at some point in its past, in their native terrain, these fountain grass types “were exposed to constant environmental conditions that were extremely hostile” and rapidly fluctuating between dry and wet.

The researchers call this kind of flexible adaptiveness “plasticity,” and they suggest that fountain grass gave up for its plasticity some of its ability to evolve genetically. That's why, in widely separated parts of the world, fountain grass looks essentially the same genetically.

This is a pretty new idea in conservation biology. The standard story of the progression of life in places like Hawai'i and the Galapagos has been that of species—whether birds, plants or insects—that settle into new environmental niches, and then evolve to best take advantage of those niches.

Fountain grass represents another view: that some species carry a bag of tricks that lets them survive anywhere.

“In contrast to typical Darwinian evolution, the single super-genotype identified here persists and survives exposure under most environmental conditions. Further examination of other species may reveal further super-genotypes, and it may be found that this is a more common, significant but hitherto overlooked mechanism driving survival and local fitness of plant populations.”

© 2007 Jan W. TenBruggencate

See the article: www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0000590

Forest birds, beetles and koa trees: size matters

If you replant a koa forest, how soon does it become useful habitat for native creatures?

It seems to be a matter of, if you build it, they will come. But both age and location also matter, according to research by Steve Goldsmith of Austin College in Texas.

(Photo: 'Akiapōlā'au on a tree. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.)

Goldsmith worked in the Hakalau Forest National Wildlife Refuge, where more than 30,000 acres of a native forest sweep up and down from an elevation a mile high on the windward slopes of Mauna Kea.

Some of that forest has never been logged, but other sectors were converted a century or more ago to pasture and are being replanted in koa in other species.

Goldsmith's work was on the density of beetles in the koa trees. The beetles, while they are pests to the koa trees, are a part of the native ecosystem, and they're a food source for native birds, notably the 'akiapōlā'au, whose Latin name is Hemignathus munroi.

These yellow native forest birds are remarkable in part because their beaks form two separate tools. A stout, short lower beak is used woodpecker-like for excavating trees, while their longer, slender and curved upper beak is used for probing and pulling out food items, like beetles.

Among their prey are a pair of longhorned beetle species found only in Hawai'i, Plagithmysus claviger and Plagithmysus varians. These bore into dead branches of koa trees.

The goal of Goldsmith and fellow researchers Hayley Gillespie and Cole Weatherby was to determine how the age of the forest affected the population of the beetles. Their work was published in the September 2007 edition of The Southwestern Naturalist.

They studied young koa plantations that were planted 3 to 8 years earlier, middle-aged plantations with trees 12 to 15 years old, and then compared those with ancient trees that formed the canopy in native forest.

The result, perhaps predictable, was that the older, bigger trees have more dense populations of beetles.

Goldsmith, in an email, said “that the trees of the intact forest harbors the most beetles (per branch), that the trees of the older plantations have fewer beetles per branch (but still substantial numbers), and that the trees of the young plantations have the fewest beetles per branch.”

To a certain point, the fact that bigger trees have bigger dead branches accounts for the difference, although there is a point where getting a lot bigger doesn't seem to make a great deal of difference, he said.

Also, the beetles seem to be gregarious critters. Branches tend to have either a colony of them, or none at all. The Goldsmith team did not find many branches with solitary beetles.

In a second article in the same journal, Goldsmith noted that beetles change density with elevation.

The koa trees on the high, colder slopes have fewer beetles than lower slopes. Goldsmith said both climate and seasonal changes appear to be at play in the density difference by elevation.

Goldsmith credited the management team at Hakalau Forest National Wildlife Refuge for improving the habitat for native creatures.

“The folks at the refuge deserve a lot of credit and recognition for their hard work to preserve what is left of Hawaiian montane forest and its biota,” he said.

Scientists have long known that for many native bird species, a mature forest has more value than a young one, not only for things like insect food, but things like the presence of cavities that can be used for nesting.

© 2007 Jan W. TenBruggencate

Counting populations: Superferries and tropicbirds

The August Superferry protests on Kaua'i challenged my crowd-counting skills, and reinforced the value of accurate population assessments.
(Image: Red-tailed tropicbird and chick. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service photo.)

Counting individuals, or development techniques to develop reasonably accurate counts, are valuable in assessing the size of crowds of humans, but also crowds of critters, as we will see later in this article.

In my case, the work was comparatively simple. One media account said there were 1,000 people at the protest of Superferry Alakai's first sailing to Kaua'i. Superferry representatives were claiming the crowd on the Nāwiliwili Jetty was no larger than 150.

I've been counting crowds for nearly 40 years in lots of circumstances. It's fairly easy when they're in a stadium or auditorium because you have a known number of seats, which brackets the possible crowd count. (If the place seats 5,000 and the fire department's on hand, you won't get more than 5,000. You can ask about ticket sales, count full seats, count empty seats, or do representative samplings to get a number. Or use a combination of these technques.)

Milling crowds in the open are more difficult.

I used a couple of different crowd-counting techniques for the Superferry crowd, employing one method as a check on the other. I came up with close to 300, and that's the number I used to describe the crowd on the first day of the protest.

But because the numbers from other media and those asserted by Superferry supporters were so different, on Protest Day Two, I did my calculations and then backed those calculations up with an actual census by simply walking from one end to another and counting every single individual. The Nāwiliwili Jetty crowd was strung out for about a quarter mile, so the counting was pretty easy and only took a few minutes.

My initial calculated estimates on the second day of the protest came in at about 250, and my actual count came to 310—the difference largely because when I walked the crowd I found there was a clutch of a few dozen protesters at the mauka end inside Niumalu Park, a group I hadn't seen earlier.

Crowd-counting ain't rocket science, but it does require a little attention to detail.

I had what you might call a “high degree of confidence” in my numbers, but we still had people calling the newsroom to tell us our numbers were wrong. You get a lot of that—criticism from people who either have an ax to grind, who are mistaken or who are pathetically lacking a clue.

For scientists counting wildlife, the numbers can be more important. You want them to be accurate enough that you can distinguish long-term trends.

In a November issue of the journal Biological Conservation, Nathaniel Seavy and Michelle Reynolds, both of the U.S. Geological Survey's Pacific Islands Ecosystem Research Center, Kïlauea Field Station, on the Big Island, reviewed population counts for red-tailed tropicbirds at Tern Island in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands.

Their paper is entitled, “Is statistical power to detect trends a good assessment of population monitoring?”

One of the things they were trying to determine: If the population of a species drops 50 percent over time, are your counts accurate enough to detect it?

In this situation, you need to understand that at Tern Island, seabirds don't come in individuals. They come in clouds. Of some species, there are tens of thousands. How do one or two people wandering a little island count those kinds of numbers?

With birds, there are all kinds of difficulties. At any given time, some of the population might be sitting on the nest, but some of the population might be feeding. The proportions can change with the time of day, the progress of the breeding cycle and the time of year, along with weather and lots of other things (like the presence of a human with a clipboard causing birds to change their behavior).

“Trend and power analyses alone are sensitive to the sampling period, sampling methods, and the statistical model used (and they) should not be the only tool to evaluate population status,” Reynolds said in an email.

And how can you tell whether changes you detect in a bird population are real, or perhaps the result of what Seavy and Reynolds call “observation error?”

The authors recommend close attention to monitoring methods, but also to the biology of the birds. You can spend too much time focusing on a trend without knowing whether the trend is significant, they say.

In some cases, “statistical power to detect trends is less important than understanding the long-range variability of the population.”

The upshot is that you never trust your methods entirely, you back them up with alternative counting systems when possible, and you constantly look for errors in your methods or ways to improve them.

© 2007 Jan W. TenBruggencate