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AA: The floor is opened up for our Commissioners. <br /> <br />RD: Derrick, well done, Robert Duerr, District – 1. Well, well done, you know, congratulations and <br />keep up the good work. A question – do you have any sense of the numbers of animals on <br />islands? <br /> <br />DR: Yeah, that’s a great question and a question we get asked often. And fortunately, we have an <br />idea – so I don’t know if you noticed on the maps or whatever, but we used the term “relative <br />abundance” because it’s very difficult to get numbers and density information. Basically, we’ve <br />tried to do it over the last few years but basically what it requires is that you have to mark and <br />individual and recapture that individual on the camera and it works well for species that have <br />unique markings, I know they do it in Africa with giraffes who all have unique markings and <br />zebras and things like that but unfortunately our ungulates here are very difficult to uniquely <br />identify, yeah, one black pig is very hard to tell from a different black pig of similar size and so <br />unfortunately we don’t have that number information but we do have an idea of, you know, if <br />you’re comparing one area to another you can look at the relative abundance of one area in <br />comparison to the other, yeah, great question though. <br /> <br />RD: Another question from \[unclear\]. Are you using any kind of acoustic tags, you know, either <br />satellite or \[unclear\] to track migrations and movement? <br /> <br />DR: We are not, no, unfortunately, I know a few studies done years ago with radio collars and things <br />like that, but I don’t know of many that have done that, yeah, unfortunately we’re not. <br /> <br />BL: Brian, District – 4. Hey, thanks for your presentation and everything. We, there’s always been <br />some controversy and some issues on these things are you figuring, what a good game <br />management would be for these areas or are you guys just going for the point that these <br />ungulates need to be removed from the landscape? That’s the first question. <br /> <br />DR: Yeah, so, our goal is to produce data so as UH and as researchers obviously we don’t have the <br />mandate to make decisions about the management of these animals but what we’re trying to do <br />is produce data in a neutral way to say where they are and so that if someone wants to identify <br />what game management actions need to take place or what conservation actions need to take <br />place we’re hopefully producing the data to help make those decisions but we’re not putting <br />that on top of the data, we’re just trying to produce a baseline data set to be used for whatever <br />reason. <br /> <br />MP: (Melissa Price) And I’ll jump in on that one real, quick. I think one of the things we think a lot <br />about is how to achieve different goals with the pigs so I appreciate the question and the chat <br />from Chiara and I’ll forward you, or I’ll put into the chat a paper by Pupaalua at Hueo who just <br />finished a masters in my lab looking at the Hawaiian newspapers and the historical relationship <br />of Hawaiians and pigs over time, which is a really beautiful bit of works. I’ll put the link to that in <br />the chat in just a moment but, um, you know there’s two big goals. One is to hopefully make <br />sure that there’s food provisioning and how to make sure that we protect native plants and <br />other things we care about and so it really becomes a matter of thinking about those goals and <br />how we quantify those goals and how can we achieve those goals given where the animals are <br />and the impact they’re having. So we asked a lot what do we think the right number is – well, it <br />17 <br /> <br /> <br />