2017-02-17 Game Management Advisory Commission Minutes

Home

Hawaii Game Management Advisory Commission Meeting Minutes — February 13, 2017 out how to extract the DNA to match it with a worldwide library of different Ceratocystis and nailed down what it was. I do want to mention there are a lot of other things in the world killing ohia. Those of you who know the forest, there was a huge concern about ohia die back in the 1980s up Saddle Road — Mauna Loa, Mauna Kea, windward sides. There was the puccinia outbreak — that's that yellow fungus that knocked out the rose apple about ten years ago. It still here. This is not that — there other things. We saw some what we thought was this disease in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park last year — we cut it — we found that bright, yellow, golden colored stuff so there's some sort of root rot that we haven't identified and this isn't that. There are a lot of other diseases going on. When I have a landowner asking me about it — most of the trees that die in someone's lawn is from too much roundup and weed whacking- so there's that too. So it turns out — this is back to the genetics of it — that there about 1,000 different samples of Ceratocystis DNA in the global libraries — ours doesn't match any — so we have — it turns out that we not only have one new species we have two new species of this fungus Ceratocystis on the island. Now to make the plot even more interesting — one is related to ones that are Latin American — one is related to ones that are Asian — so there are two diseases — two new diseases that are spreading on the island and they're obviously different introductions — cause they came from different parts of the world. They're distantly related to a rot sweet potato — but they're not the same thing — it's not that the sweet potato one jumped to the ohia or the ohia one is from sweet potato — quite separate — so how they got here — we don't know. We don't see any other plant - we're still looking at it — the lab. This work is the USDA ARS lab here in Hilo is testing our ohia fungus on different plants to see if it can grow and live and move on something else - Did we get it here that way? Are we moving it around that way? So far there's nothing else that really grows on it — so kind of a mystery with that — where they came from. We really want to know this cause we don't want to keep importing new things. don't know if you all are testifying in favor of the biosecurity plan that the governor put forward — but we need better bio security. We get so many pests and diseases and weeds here that we really need to do a better job in not letting all this stuff in. How do we know that this fungus caused the disease, basically what you do is you culture the fungus that you see in these dying trees or dead trees - inoculate a healthy tree with it and watch and see if the tree dies and then can you get the fungus back out again. This was done in 2014 with seedlings and we identified - completed the cycle — identified this fungus was published early January 2015. — We're going on two years knowing what this is. On the mainland, there's a disease — a Ceratocystis wilt of oak. We just had someone out here who works with that. She spent two weeks out here and she's been working on that since 1970s — so she's close to 40 years in on knowing about that. We're close to two years about learning about this so we have a long way to go. As I present things, you're gonna hear a lot of well, this is what we 11