2017-02-17 Game Management Advisory Commission Minutes

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Hawaii Game Management Advisory Commission Meeting Minutes — February 13, 2017 that they're dunneling in these trees that are infected and so they get a lot of fungus on them so about 10% of them are carrying fungal spores. What we're not sure of is are they hitting healthy trees and moving the disease that way. Are they just hitting — creating all this frass from the sawdust from digging into trees? There are other disease — now the new guy that we got last October — he was just working on a disease on laurel and avocado in the South Easter U.S. and that disease is carried one beetle is enough — one of these tiny little beetles into a tree is enough to infect the tree. He's helping looking at this — Is this moving it. One thing I do notice is the beetles are attracted to a wound. Again, if you wound a tree — if you bang it with an axe or a machete — their volatile chemicals will come out of that. The beetles can smell those so they'll go into it. That could be another way that wounding causes the things to get disease. KD: Now a lot of people market this. Now you concerned about like Waimea and I see a lot of people marketing these logs and basically the market is in Waimea for their fireplaces. So how you going control that cause they're actually selling these logs for fireplaces in Waimea, so they transporting 'em with their trucks. And they stackin' 'em all outside their homes. JB: The Department of Ag in 2015 put on a quarantine to not move ohia off island. They didn't feel it was practical to do a within -island quarantine and we were discussing that again today. They didn't think it was practical to say OK, quarantine — you may not move ohia from Hilo side up to Waimea. I remember the banana bunchy -top quarantine — you couldn't bring bananas to Kona. It wasn't successful. Where our approach so far has been advising people not to do it — but it's still on the table. Should Department of Ag try to put a legal quarantine and a restriction — you're not allowed to move ohia wood past this point and there'd be some point on the Hamakua coast. You cannot move it past here. I hate to have regulations that nobody enforces. Other people think it would be worthwhile having that in — that is a quarantine in. Very much a concern. One of the other things that we're talking about is that there's only a window when the beetles are gonna infect the trees — so right after they die, the tree on the left there just died — it's gonna infect it after about a couple months — maybe three to six months and for about two years — once the tree's been dead after like three or four years they don't have any more. We're not seeing any more beetle activity. They've dried out — so there's trees on the right have been dead five or six years — no more beetles in there so it's just — it's a moving target between the disease and the beetles and one of the things that I've been seeing on the landscape of the island — you see a lot of trees dying and then there's kind of a wave of mortality and then it slows down and then something breaks out. This is part of the dynamic we're figuring out for. Management — don't move ohia wood — don't move plants around. Wood we can test — the way we tested those logs, you see the blue chalk marks on them, we took a slice off the 20