|
planning to sample anyway, and we come from Lahaina and come across the channel. The
<br />channel was brown all the way across. It rained like the dickens over in West Mui, in this
<br />January 2002 storm. Normally, we've had storms like that in the past. I've been on Lana`i now
<br />for close to 20 years, 15 years. We've had big rainfall events, and these things, you get what I
<br />call, it vex out, it flushes out pretty fast, usually, on the order of a couple of weeks to a couple of
<br />months, and I'm talking very dirty water, extremely turbid water.
<br />Well, this particular event, it did not flush out. We came back several times to do our biological
<br />sampling, we have stations on the bottom just like we do out here, and we couldn't sample until
<br />April, late April of 2002. It was so dirty I couldn't see four or five inches in front of my face, so
<br />you can imagine how dirty this is.
<br />Now there's a lot of coral in these areas, and the thought was, gee, this coral is just going to eat it.
<br />Okay. To put everything in perspective, I have stations right in front of development and away
<br />from development. The declining coral cover actually with the 2002 rainfall events, and we had
<br />three big events through 2002, and that dirty water stayed around until after the third event,
<br />which occurred in October. Over a period of three days, we had 16 inches of rain on the south
<br />shore of Lana`i. You can imagine. Because there's lousy vegetative cover, it runs off like crazy,
<br />you know. It's really pilau, it's really dirty.
<br />The decline in living coral cover there was about 1.5 percent at stations fronting the
<br />development. Now IÓm not saying the development was good, the d
<br />they got a golf course and stuff, and they've engineered it and stuff, so that doesn't say it doesn't
<br />run off. It ran off there like crazy, too. It was dirty as the dickens. And my control stations, up
<br />to kilometers away, many kilometers away, it was closer to 6 percent of the living coral. But the
<br />point I want to make is that despite that huge input, and it lingered, it just -, I mean for an
<br />amazing amount of time, the coral survived, basically survived. We've seen that elsewhere.
<br />Further south here, we seen the same thing exactly. Very little mortality, with large inputs.
<br />The long term changes, you know, with silty water like Kki`o, , you know, the
<br />`Anaeho`omalu
<br />bays, I think those bays were probably fairly -, they tend to be clean in the morning and in the
<br />afternoon they're silty, you know. The wind picks up, the surf picks up a bit. It stirs the stuff up
<br />off the bottom, and it's probably been going on since before I was born. So I suspect that the
<br />coral communities have evolved with these kinds of perturbations
<br />you will, so to a large extent, these things really handled it pretty well, these corals so -.
<br />GRAHAM:Okay.
<br />BROCK:Yeah.
<br />GRAHAM:Thanks very much. We probably need to get to the public.
<br />BROCK:Yeah.
<br />GRAHAM:Appreciate your thoughts.
<br />15
<br />
<br />
|