2021-09-19 Game Management Advisory Commission Minutes

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80 something percent for sure that those died a Rapid Ohia Death. Now what you’re seeing on this map, though, is this vertical green line up and down is the border of the park. To the right – the east side of the park – it’s a State Forest Reserve. The west it’s the park. Now by 2020 they had pretty much removed the sheep and feral pigs from the park there and you see an enormous amount of disease on the state side of the forest and not on the park side. Same forest, same environment – the one’s got animals one doesn’t have animals. So this is something that we’re really looking at – what can we do to protect our forests from Rapid Ohia Death? We can’t control hurricanes but we can control where the animals are. So here’s another example of a similar situation – this is up in the Olaa – so above Volcano – so up at the end of Wright Road there – the green lines are the fences and are the national park. This blue line is a helicopter flight path, again, the dots are the same thing. Trees that show symptoms from the air showing Rapid Ohia Death and you see a lot more outside the fence in state forest reserve than inside in 2020 – oh, sorry 2019 – this was a photo from 2019. This area here the koa unit was pretty much big free – this area outside in the state forest reserve – it is a hunting area – has a lot of pigs in it – so this, again, is showing that to protect the native forest from Rapid Ohia Death one tool that we have is keeping the animals out of it. One other study that I want to mention and, you know, I want to brief and have some time for discussion on this – this was a pod study – just looking at the effect of woundings – so this was a study – it was done in the greenhouse with seedlings – they - and partly to see do the trees take up the pathogen through their roots – we wanted to know that so seedlings in the nursery mulched with saw dust taken from infected trees – so cut down a couple infected tree – chain sawed them till you got a bunch of chain saw dust for mulch – mulched the seedlings. So what they saw is that if they put down seedlings with the mulch – the sawdust on top of it and nothing else – none of the seedlings got the disease. If they dinged the seedlings – they put a little slice right down at the root collar – the woody roots right at the base and put the mulch on it – those all got the disease. So that combination of the pathogen and the injury to the trees led the disease. Then after 3 months when they took trees that had been healthy for 3 months – those trees – went back – nicked the roots on ‘em again – right at the base of the seedling then they got the disease. So it just showing that the disease – the injury – allows the plant to get the disease in that – so evidence to that’s possibly the mechanism. Pigs don’t tear the bark off the way, I mean, goats with nothing to browse they’ll start browsing bark. Cattle will browse bark. Pigs don’t browse bark they do rub trees but they also dig around and tear roots up – that may be the mechanism – we’re still working on looking at what the mechanism is on that but, um, we’re really coming down on if we want to protect some of our native forests fencing ‘em and keeping the animals out is the way to protect them and really looking at, you know, most of our forests – people on the other islands are writing off the Big Island but most Big Island forest is still pretty healthy – but we want to keep it that way. So I wanted to give you my contact information and then we can stop sharing have some more discussion on that. I wanted to keep this short and have an opportunity for discussion. That’s my contact information up here in Hilo: 969- 8254. Probably better to email me jbfriday@hawaii.edu and I will shut this down and then I’m happy to take whatever questions you folks have. 17