2023_10_17 Game Management Advisory Commission Minutes

Home

health as well – so I would feel like it’s kind of a win-win, but, yeah, at Kahaluu we did some sampling in 2018 that revealed really, really high levels of oxybenzone in the water and then we sampled again in 2020, oh, I’ve lost all track of time now – I want to say 2020 and we saw a huge decrease, because we’ve been there trying to, you know, inform people – provide an alternative – we have three mineral sunscreen dispensers out at the park there and so trying to just, you know, encourage people just learn a little more, know their impact and like if there’s something as simple as that that we can do, you know, we can make that switch. NR: Natalie, District – 7, is there anything legislative in the works to at least protect Kahaluu to do that for having people like to implement the reef-safe sunscreen in that specific area? KC: So luckily in 20 – now, again, I want to say 2021 or 2022 Hawaii County Council voted to only sell and distribute mineral sunscreen in Hawaii County. Maui County did it first so anywhere you go here in Hawaii County and you go to the store and you buy sunscreen it’s all gonna be mineral sunscreen – so we’ve been kind of like helping that process along but, yeah, it’s been implemented and I think is a positive step for our community, for our water ways for our ecosystems and for our community health so, yeah. But in terms of bigger plans for Kahaluu that’s always a tricky thing but I’ll just plug this really quick – we did just roll out our community- driven monitoring plan for Kahaluu – Nana Kahaluu – and so, maybe there’ll be an opportunity in the future to speak to you guys again about opportunities to get involved with that, it’s a first step in a long-term process of establishing some sort of community action plan – a monitoring plan for Kahaluu so, yeah… AG: Austin Griffey, District – 6, what is coral bleaching? KC: Oh, that’s a good question. So coral bleaching is a response to stress so when coral – I have a – let me show you – this is I guess the best I can do, but – so coral has, you know, hundreds and thousands of little polyps – that’s the little animals – so this little guy here – can you guys – but the guy on the right with the little tentacles – so it’s the same family as like jelly fish – anemones – and so within their cells their photosynthetic marine algae that they’re actually able to photosynthesize and that’s how they get a lot of their energy – I would say 70-80% of their energy. When they’re stressed and usually it’s thermal stress – the heat stress – they actually expel that photo synthetic green algae out into the water column and it’s almost like a – people spend their lifetimes understanding this process – it’s like an oxidative – it’s like stress response – like we’re like having a fever – we just like don’t want any blankets on us, you know, so they released this out – that causes them to lose their color, and so that’s why you see that white coral – but that also puts them in this really extreme state of stress because they’re not able to feed themselves as much as they could before so they’re really sensitive to any other stressors – a lot of times when they do bleach they just succumb to that and they die. If conditions return to normal within a certain period of time they can recover from that but a lot of times bleaching usually means that they’ll die, yeah, so when we reduce other stressors around that time it can be helpful like physical damage, sunscreen – you want a lot of herbivores on the reef eating the algae, um, so, yeah, great question though. AA: Abraham, District – 5, is there any future works to be worked on the break wall? KC: On the Menehune? Yeah, that’s another great question. We have some, ah, we have looked into different things about that wall. And the main thing right now is that there’s so much life – so 13