2017-02-17 Game Management Advisory Commission Minutes

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Hawaii Game Management Advisory Commission Meeting Minutes — February 13, 2017 not going to help for a seedling but what that tells us is the kiln dried wood — which you're gonna heat up to like 150 — 160 — is gonna kill the fungus. Also compost — I'm gonna get to the compost later. How is it moving around? The fungus is in the sap when it grows up and down the sapwood of the tree. It's not under the bark, it's not under the cambium, it's not on the bark, it's not on the surface — this is the way it's different than the oak wilt — cause the spores for the oak wilt are on the surface of the tree — this is not — it's all on the inside, but if you cut a dead tree and you move it, you just moved a lot of spores of that fungus to somewhere else. If you take logs as firewood and then cut them up with your chain saw in your driveway — you just blew out all that sawdust with all the spores of that fungus. We knew that the fungus would last at least a year — I just found out today someone sampled some trees that have been dead about four years and was able to recover viable spores of the fungus from those trees — so these trees died about four years ago — he took some samples — put 'em in culture and sure enough the fungus can still sprout and grow. So, moving wood around is a bad idea — please don't do it. The bottom picture here is a stack of firewood in Leilani — the landowner cut up his trees cause they died and he burns 'em in his wood stove for firewood — that's a great use of 'em — use it there. I mean if you give it to your neighbor next door that's fine — what I don't want to see is people cutting down trees for firewood in Leilani and bringing that infected wood up to Paauilo or Waimea — where we don't see the disease — that would spread the disease — so we're asking people not to do that. The posts — like I said — they forest products made out of ohia — the biggest one is flooring — the flooring is kiln dried — that'll kill the fungus — the second one is posts for building — posts aren't kiln dried — air drying isn't gonna do it — posts are not kiln dried so posts are potentially infective. With the Department of Ag quarantine of a year and a half ago now — anybody who wants to move posts off the island needs to have it inspected by the Department of Ag and they have been busy inspecting posts — this load of posts here — someone wanted to build a house with them on Kauai — they were found to be infected with Ceratocystis and the Department of Ag did not let them move. So far we haven't found it on any other island — we've not found it in Hamakua or Kohala on this island. Now, the other way it moves around, though, is that infected trees get really hit badly by the boring beetles — the ambrosia beetles that bore into them — there are times when they get nailed and you can just collect spoonfuls of this sawdust that they create underneath the trees. If you take that sawdust and you plate it out it's full of fungal spores — it really grows very well — so that, first of all, is something that's very infective that's blowing around, second that's landing on the ground so if you drive on your truck through a stand that's all infected in this, you get a lot of mud on your wheel wells — you will have a lot of fungal spores also on the underside of your truck, as it's - moving that around. We've sampled soil in infected stands and we can recover the DNA of the fungus in about five percent of the samples. If you drive your 13