2019 02-12 Game Management Advisory Commission Minutes

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Hawaii Game Management Advisory Commission Meeting Minutes – February 12, 2019 slot limit – you’re just not allowed to take anything over – I want to say it’s 4 inches but it might be 4.5 inches. So like a fairly larger Kole Tang. You can take – there’s a bag limit – you can take five oversized per day and then the Pakakui – the Achilles Tang – there’s a bag limit of ten fish per diver per day – and that’s pretty much that. The aquarium fishery, though, is different than a lot of other fisheries because primarily what it does is it targets small fish that are still in their juvenile phase and I don’t know if you guys are very familiar with how that works but typically – especially with reef fish – they’re in the highest densities post recruitment – like they really have a high fecundity rate – they reproduce at an extremely high amount on a very regular basis and they’re kind of at the bottom of the food chain as far as – they’re not like an Apex predator or anything – they’re actually more a part of the food web – feeding other types of fish and obviously performing their duties eating algae and things like that or whatever they consume – but they’re highly abundant and there’s large quantities of them and they pretty much recruit on to Hawaii’s reefs from about March until November – it correlates with the spawning season so we have, you know, our water in Hawaii is typically warm 8 months of the year and it’s really only like four months of the year when we kinda have drops in temperatures and things like that and when that occurs reproduction – the broadcast spawning of all these reef fish slows down and that’s when there’s less recruitment occurring – and when I say “recruitment” what that is, is these fish are all broadcast spawners – meaning at dusk all the fish from the reef of a particular type – let’s say Yellow Tang – they all gather up – they kind of follow a trail and they’ll go out to the edge of the reef and they’ll form a big hui out there and they’ll start spinning around and oscillating and ones will start popping up into the center casting egg and the other ones will cast roe and it fertilizes them – from that point – and this is a huge congregation of fish – if you can use your imagination – this is like all the Yellow Tangs on that one particular reef – you know, there could be thousands even – coming together right there doing this thing and they’re all reproducing on it – and this actually occurs on a daily basis – with the heaviest egg development being around the full moon – one Yellow Tang can produce on average 75,000 to 100,000 viable eggs per fish. Some of the ones that are a little bit more – have more vitality – like a younger adult can produce upwards to 150,000 – so double that – of vital eggs and that can actually be on a daily basis – they create eggs that quickly and what happens is once these eggs are fertilized then this broadcast spawn – they go through a period of metamorphosis – they’re drifting – they’re bound to the rules of the environment – they get – the current kind of dictates where they go – they get swept out into the gyre – there’s a gyre that runs on the west coast of the Big Island and they kind of move around there in their planktonic phase. Yellow Tangs, for example, have a larvae phase of approximately 50-55 days... TN: Could you get on with the EIS study that the Supreme Court... EK: The Supreme Court – well it kind of ties into – so we had all these that we put into place and over the years we’ve had many things at the County and the 24