2024-11-19 GMAC Meeting Minutes DRAFT

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important to remember for everybody is that pigs have a need for water, especially in warmer climates and although I consider Hawaii in the summer as a very nice comfortable climate because at home it’s 110 degrees and Hawaii has the ocean to keep you nice and comfortable. Pigs, when it gets to be warm – they don’t do very well. The thing that I have to remind everyone is pigs – the wild animal that we bred domestic pigs from – whether that’s pigs from Southeast Asia or whether that’s pigs from western Europe – those animals perform best in cold climates – they evolved in cold climates – so they don’t shed heat very well at all, so they need the water to cool down – they need to drink a lot of it – they need to bathe in a lot of it and so we see a lot of damage to our ponds, our streams, our rivers – we see a lot of erosion – we see a lot of riparian vegetation, but probably one of the bigger issues we run into aside from the damage to those plants is we see a lot of contamination in the water. In every place I’ve worked we’ve seen fecal coliforms, E. coli go off the charts in the water, sometimes bad enough that they EPA comes in and they say this watershed is unsafe to be in, it’s unsafe for recreation, it’s unsafe for animals and the EPA comes in and closes it down and says you can’t be here. It’s a very real problem that we face from pigs. Aside from that is you’ll know in, in Hawaii you fight invasive plants all the time – that is one of the things I’ve learned the times I’ve been lucky enough to be in your state is that invasive plants are a common problem that our two homelands share – so, for us we have a lot of invasive plants that were brought in over the years either because people wanted to produce whatever the fruit or the nut was from them, or they wanted to have some ornamental and the ornamental plant went crazy. What we see from pigs is this – typically we see an increase in these undesirable invasive species for one of two reasons – either because the pigs don’t eat the seed or the nut from them but they happen to – the trees happen to grow around water. If they happen to grow around water where the pigs are wallowing around to stay cool – the pigs will actually pick the seeds up in the mud against their body and then they walk away and the mud dries - you have a clump of wet mud with a seed in the middle of it and I can’t think of a better way to spread those plants and in many cases those plants evolved with the pigs in Europe and Asia and they’re designed to be spread by pigs – we just brought the pigs and the plants to a new place. We see those things increase. We also though see a decrease and a lot for us it’s our mass producing trees, you know, our oaks species – the things that produce these nuts – a high food value – a high nutrition value – anything that’s gonna produce nuts and so we see those decline but more importantly we never see these native plants get to go to seed and grow new seedlings and take off because there might not be a native animal that goes and eats that seed out or they don’t eat very many, but the pigs not being native – they can get in and eat all of the seed out from the ground – they eat the seedlings of those trees so we see a decrease in our native plants that we also struggle to keep around. We fight invasives and many of our ecosystems it’s tough to find a native plant anymore, whether that’s grass and weeds or trees, and we do see for a lot of our trees that might be of some kind of economic value – you’ll see what you have in this photo here – where pigs rub against them to get parasites off of them or whatever else they need to do – get the mud off – and they end up girdling that tree and killing it. And we have a number of native trees that are fairly sensitive in their bark – not thick 8