2020-12-15 Game Management Advisory Commission Minutes

Home

TS: So over the past four months or so we’ve having a state of incidents where people have been allegedly using ant pesticide to collect \[unclear\] prawns in the northern parts of South Hilo and in North Hilo. And it’s been spanning across these two districts, so, the unfortunate thing and \[unclear\] thing is that, you know, these pesticides that they’re allegedly using are highly toxic to aquatic life so when they actually use this in the stream it actually kills everything, and it’s a highly illegal activity. Unfortunately, we haven’t really been able to \[unclear\] cause it’s been several incidents but we do have one case where a suspect was identified and we are pursuing civil enforcement action through our court – land board. So that’s pending right now, so we’ve been working – Aquatic Resources Division – our DOCARE Division – Department of Ag – we’ve all been working together to try to collect as much information as we can for all of these incidents that have been \[unclear\], you know, doing surveys, follow-ups \[unclear\] stream to do bio assessments, Department of Ag has been collecting soil samples to see if they can detect the pesticides in these soils in these areas where the incidents have been reported. Our DOCARE officer Edwin has been leading the investigation and going out to the communities and residents to collect as much information as he can across all of these reports that we’ve been having. We’ve had two press releases that came out to let the public know about this. It’s been across the news, the media, newspapers, social media and everything to really get everyone to see and be as vigilant as they can, just because we only have so many eyes that, you know, \[unclear\] division – we need everyone in the community to help out because it’s really, really \[unclear\] to catch anyone doing this. But I’ll hand it over to Edwin to kinda give more details about the investigations that he’s been – Edwin if you have any further information to share… ES: Yeah. Hello everyone. Edwin Shishido, DLNR Enforcement. Over the past – like Troy said - four months – we had a total of eight reports of possible poisonings and of those eight, I believe three of ‘em came back positive for the poison and we also had the Department of Ag collect sediment samples from the bottom of the streams because it’s actually settled down to the bottom and prawn samples that we’ve collected from the people that live around there – luckily – they froze it right away – because it breaks down in the body really quickly, so luckily they froze it and it turned out positive, so, out of the eight, three came back positive and we’ve had other so called reports of it – but it’s 11