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

Something else to worry about: radiation, mercury, and now plastics in deep sea fish.

If radiation and mercury weren’t scary enough, there’s plastic in them there deep sea fishes.

We know that plastic washes up on our beaches, that turtles eat it and that seabirds die with bellies full of it—but it’s also in the fish we eat.

New research indicates that fish, directly or indirectly, eat bits of plastic, and lots of it. And not just the stuff on the surface but also plastics that drift at depth in the water column. 

University of Hawai`i Department of Oceanography researchers Anela Choy and Jeffrey Drazen looked into the stomach contents of hundreds of fish from 10 deep ocean species. One in five had plastic in them. The accompanying image, from the University of Hawai`I at Manoa, shows some of the plastics removed from fishes.

We’re eating these fish, and we don’t fully understand what the impacts of the plastics may have on the fish, or on us,” the authors wrote. 

“These observations are the first of their kind in scope and number, and suggest that more attention should be given to marine debris in subsurface waters as well as to poorly understood organismal and food web implications,” they wrote.

Their work, under the title, “Plastic for dinner? Observations of frequent plastic ingestion by pelagic predatory fishes from the central North Pacific,” was published in the journal Marine Ecology Progress Series. 

The paper is available here. 

You can find a University of Hawaii press release (less technical) about it here. 

The researchers had NOAA fishery observers collect the stomachs of the catch from longline fisheries around Hawai`i. They collected samples from mahimahi, two kinds of opah, broadbill swordfish, longnose lancetfish, hauliuli or snake mackerel, walu or Hawaiian butterfish, and skipjack, yellowfin and bigeye tuna.

We tend to be aware of plastics floating on the surface, but this study found plastic in fish that only feed deep in the water column, suggesting that plastic pollution pervades the ocean at multiple levels.

They found that many of the plastics in the fish are not surface floaters, but have a density that allows them to drift at different depths.

The fish may not be eating the plastics directly—but rather already inside smaller creatures. The studied fish are, after all, predators. So, some fish may actually be mistaking plastics for food, but many may simply be feeding on plankton, small fishes, squids or crustaceans that have themselves eaten plastic.

It is all worrisome, the authors say: “Plastic ingestion in large pelagic fishes is more prevalent than previously suggested.”

“Many plastics adsorb PCBs, organochlorine pesticides, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, metals, and petroleum hydrocarbons, some of which may desorb in acidic stomachs resulting in uptake to the animal. Indeed, it has been shown that seabirds that ingested plastic had higher PCB concentrations in their fat tissues, and seabird chicks fed plastics showed increasing PCB concentrations. 

“Given the global commercial importance of … large pelagic fishes … future research might

evaluate whether these fishes carry elevated chemical toxin burdens that may ultimately pose a risk to the seafood-consuming public,” the authors wrote.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2013

El Nino, hurricanes, climate change: a year-end update

It’s easy to overlook the El Nino phenomenon when we haven’t had one for a couple of years.

The latest forecast from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is that El Nino neutral conditions will continue at least through summer, but that chances of a new El Nino increase then. The last significant El Nino was nearly four years ago. 

El Nino is that oscillating climate pattern that has dramatic impacts on rainfall and drought, storm frequency and strength, wind patterns and many other parts of the climate picture. When the pattern is on the warm side, it’s called El Nino, and when conditions are cooler, it’s La Nina.

A strong El Nino  involves unusually warm equatorial waters south of Hawai`i and toward the American coast. In the Islands, the main concerns are that it can be associated with more hurricanes, and with drought in winter, when we normally count on rainfall to make up for summer dryness.

They seem to show up every two to five years. In the past two decades, we have seen them in 1991-92, 1994-95, 1997-98, 2002-03, 2004-05, 2006-07 and 2009-10. So, it’s been since the late spring of 2010, so you might say we’re due.

And indeed, the forecast suggests an increasing likelihood of an El Nino developing around the middle of 2014. Says NOAA: “Neutral is favored into the Northern Hemisphere summer 2014, with an increasing chance for the development of El Nino.” But it says some of the computerized climate models suggest it could still remain neutral.

We have had a very quiet decade thus far in Hawaiian waters on the hurricane front. Only two hurricanes made it into the Central Pacific in 2013: Flossie and Henriette, and both were largely played out by the time they made it to Hawai`i. In 2012, there was just one, Hurricane Daniel, and in 2011 and 2010, none. 

Could that change in 2014? It could. There are normally four to five named storms in our region each year, and that number rises somewhat in El Nino years. (Named storms include both tropical storms and hurricanes.)

For more on hurricane forecasts, check out this site from the NOAA Hurricane Forecast Improvement Program.  That's where the hurricane image at the top of this post is from.

Moving onto a related topic, a paper published a couple of months ago said that El Nino events

during the late 20^th century have been significantly more common than in the previous half millennium.

Researchers from the University of New South Wales, the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa's International Pacific Research Center and the NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, reconstructed past climate by applying new techniques to clues found in lake sediment, corals and tree rings.

They found that El Nino activity—often referred to as ENSO for El Nino Southern Oscillation-- was more active during 1979-2009 than during any other 30-year period between 1590 and 1880.

“Our results represent a significant step toward understanding where current ENSO activity sits in the context of the past,” said UH Mānoa Professor Axel Timmermann, co-author of the study.

The paper’s lead author, Shayne McGregor, said there are tantalizing clues linking El Nino to climate change, but not yet enough evidence to prove a link.

“Climate models provide no clear indication of how ENSO activity will change in the future in response to greenhouse warming, so all we have to go on is past records.

"We can improve the projections of climate models, however, by selecting those that produce past changes in ENSO activity consistent with the past records. Our new estimates of ENSO activity of the past 600 years appear to roughly track global mean temperature, but we still don't know why,” McGregor said.

Citation: S. McGregor, A. Timmermann, M. H. England, O. Elison Timm, and A. T. Wittenberg: Inferred changes in El Niño–Southern Oscillation variance over the past six centuries. Clim. Past, 9, 2269–2284, 2013. doi:10.5194/cp-9-2269-2013

© Jan TenBruggencate 2013