2017-02-17 Game Management Advisory Commission Minutes

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Hawaii Game Management Advisory Commission Meeting Minutes — February 13, 2017 don't know yet. If you look up how they deal with oak wilt on the mainland — they have a lot more — there are some ways that it's similar. There are ways we can learn from them — there are ways that are quite different. For example, the oak wilt mainly moves root by root grafting — so when one tree gets it — it's roots are grafted on to the next tree and it goes to the next tree and the next tree and the next tree. So it forms this patch of all the trees dying, but if you look at that first picture I showed of an ohia forest — they're scattered — so we don't think it's moving tree to tree — so just in that — it's moving differently. The biology of an ohia tree is not the same as an oak tree. We take what we learned from the other diseases of many other trees: eucalyptus and oak and plain trees and such — but ours is gonna be different. How the trees get infected? How it moves around the trees? Does it need a wound? How much spores does it need to cause disease? These are all things that we are currently setting up or in the middle of experiments to find out. I hired five people last year. One way or another working on this, two molecular biologists, a pathologist, an entomologist, a graduate students and a field tech working on it and that's just part of the whole team working on this. Earlier his year in January — we did the first inoculation or larger trees — we did this up Stainback where there's a lot of disease already, so we're not spreading it around. We didn't go do it in Hamakua or Pahala. What happens when you inoculate an adult tree, not just a seedling in a pot. Like I said, we've tested different hosts to see what else is susceptible to it. We've also started on a small scale looking at varieties of ohia — now, as you know, ohia's very diverse. There are five named botanical varieties of metrosideros polymorpha on the island and there are also several other species in Hawaii — not on this island — but there are other species on Oahu, Kauai — starting testing seeing what of these are vulnerable. I suspect — since it's so virulent of what we see — that there'll be a pretty wide range of viability. There are a lot of ohia. I'm headed to New Zealand in a couple of weeks — they have six of their own species of metrosideros there in New Zealand. They're super worried about this so it's gonna be interesting. A couple of things that I think are giving me a little bit of hope on it — if it gets too hot it'll kill the fungus. You don't have to get very hot to kill the fungus — this experiment is one where they took a culture of the fungus, heated it up and then tried to plate it out on a plate. I'm sorry, this is the cold — if it got down to 50 degrees, the fungus in the plate stopped growing, OK? In the Volcano these days is below 50 degrees so maybe these cooler forests will be less susceptible to the disease. I know with another - we did another project on a koa wilt fungus and it was very sensitive to temperature. The cooler forest was OK, the warmer forest caused a lot of mortality. So this is the first indication this may have something to do with it. This is the one I was thinking — temperature survival — how high do you have to heat something to kill it? Not too high. They heated the culture and then they cooled it down and plated it out on a plate — if you heated it up to 122 degrees it killed it — it couldn't grow anymore after that — that's 12