GMAC 10.17.23 Mintues Final Draft

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from this place. So we envision a thriving balance and abundant Kahaluu and, you know, that can mean different things to different people – different users – but I think in general all the different user-groups can kind of come together on this idea that Kahaluu is an important place for our community no matter in what ways it..\[unclear\]. So I want to get to – I know I only have 10 minutes and this is like such a challenge for me because I could talk about this for a long time and it’s something that’s really near and dear to my heart and so I appreciate you guys allowing me to share this with you today. So, this is just one of the species of coral that is dominant in Kahaluu, it really was more dominant back in – before 2015, many of us remember in 2015 we experienced a widespread thermal stress event which lead to a big decline in coral reefs all along the leeward coast of Hawaii, really all around the world, this was kind of an unprecedented global thermal stress event that affected coral reefs here in Hawaii but also the Great Battier Reef in a lot of the reef systems. So this coral is really just one I want to focus on because we saw a big change in 2015 and now we’ve seen – because of some of our efforts down there – a big recovery. So this is just an example of what you might see it look like on the reef – the image on the left is a juvenile just like newly recruited to the reef so this is usually one of the first species that will – just like ohia – it will colonize the reef – a new reef ecosystem first – and then you can see the coral on the right is actually probably over 30 centimeters so it’s, you know, maybe a decade or two old or older – they provide really critical habitat for fisheries on the reef – they also provide reef structure so they provide that complexity but also as we know corals on the reef provide coastal protection from wave energy and so, having this structurally intact reef really helps to dissipate that energy and provide structure for all that complexity on the reef for new fish to settle – larval settlement on the reef – any number of different invertebrates so a really important part of the whole reef ecosystem. So up until 2015 cauliflower coral was abundant in Kahaluu Bay. I remember some of my first memories of Kahaluu, surfing there with just seeing like all those dots of pink and brown as you came in from the surf area there and in 2015 like I said, we experienced that really big thermal stress event so this picture was taken prior to that and you can just see the number of cauliflower coral colonies and this picture amongst the different mounding corals \[unclear\] in there as well – but just a lot more, um, so we experienced this rapid change and that’s kind of, you know, we know our ecosystems have these big seasonal cycles maybe even a coral reef acting on a much longer timespan so these big changes – but this was really a rapid change and when you’re talking about coral that acts on this longer timespan when you see a rapid change that’s kinda when you – my alarm bells go off. So 2015 and then 2019 again, we saw widespread coral bleaching and resulting in mortality. The latest research that was just actually published estimated about a 23% decline in total coral cover along the leeward coast of Hawaii Island. So that’s a significant loss of coral, but in Kahaluu we lost about 90% of this species. So that’s a huge loss and in this really important part of that bigger ecosystem. So that really led us to think what can we do if anything to kind of assist in the recovery of this species and really looking into the future we know that these thermal stress events are gonna happen, um, if not at the same pace probably at a more rapid pace. We were expecting one this year and I’ll talk a little more about that but we’re really crossing our fingers and almost breathing that sigh of relief that we didn’t see that happen again this year. So this just shows a little kind of time period image of a coral that, you know, on the far left was healthy and providing habitat and then as you see it declined and eventually there’s really nothing left and that will erode over time on the far right. So one of the things we wanted to look at was how do we learn from the past to inform our future and our present work, and one of the things that we know is that coral spawn or reproduce based around the lunar calendar and, so, what we really wanted to do was take a deep look into the timing of this coral spawning event and realizing just how important these 9