Part Two:

So, in the first half of this rumination (previous blog entry is Part One) I was giving you the bad news…essentially, the pretty Hawaii you visit today is nearly entirely created from a mass of imported organisms that began arriving here with humanity about 2000 years ago. Some estimates say that 93% of the organisms found below about 7000 ft. in altitude are non-native. This is bad news for an ecosystem. It’s a Frankensteinsystem, shuffling along as an amalgam of unrelated parts, any of which might do surprising and not necessarily helpful things with no warning.

However.

The good news is that our oceans, these flanking and encircling arms of blue, are doing much better than that. In fact, when you strap on your mask (using defog made of biodegradable stuff, OK?) and put your head under the water, what you are seeing is pretty much what the first Polynesians to arrive in these islands saw, given that they had no masks to see under the surface with. But you get my drift. Pun intended.

Oceans on Earth are in deep, deep trouble, no doubt about that. Climate change and good old straightforward pollution, along with their bad-news buddies overfishing and habitat destruction, are changing the oceans faster than we can analyze. Where we have lucked out, here in the vast middle Pacific, is that we are in…the middle of the vast Pacific. We have a big blue buffer that is protecting us not only from the literal crap that floats off of the continental coasts, but the depth of the oceans here—20,000 ft. deep by some estimates—keeps the ocean temperatures a tad more stable. There’s just that much more volume to soak up the climbing planetary heat. And since warming oceans are appearing to kill corals, we are doing much, much better than some places such as Indonesia or Florida, which are feeling the heat, literally, more than we are.

The good news, then, is that we are in a lucky spot.

Oh, but speaking of Florida and Indonesia and suchlike places: I often hear people say, as they exit the waters here, that the reef “doesn’t look the same as FILL IN THE BLANK WITH THE NAME OF ANOTHER COUNTRY HERE”. They want to know where the delicate fan corals are, the elaborate, chandelier-esque reef structures they’ve seen in other places, and where is Nemo (the clownfish of digital animation fame)? They say to me or to each other that these reefs seem dead or odd or wrong, that something is missing. Well, yeah, something is missing, but it’s not what they think. What’s missing is their understanding of where they are and how that shapes what they see. Otherwise, ecologically and in contrast to the Hawaiian waters above the waterline, there’s not much missing in the large sense (some, yes, but not much). As I said, this blog is about the good news.

You see, those famous reefs around the world with their waving fans and their soft-bodies coral masses, with their long spirals of standing wire corals and exquisitely delicate protrusions and extensions—those reefs exist along continental flats or in other such protected zones. Notwithstanding the occasional hurricane, the waters of those areas are flattish and calmish and have allowed, over the millennia, reefs to build and evolve delicate, vulnerable forms. Hawaii, on the other hand, is an archipelago made of volcanoes that rise up from the sea floor. The heads of these volcanoes just barely peek out of the ocean—in the case of Maui, nearly 90% of its mass is under the water. Just think about that for a second. Yeah, it’s big. But anyway, reefs here have to build on the sides of unprotected structures. Winter storm swells come along and slam waves up against these structures for months, and the corals have nowhere to hide as not only water but also boulders and broken chunks of reef slosh and roll everywhere. Imagine trying to build a spider web up against the Empire State Building during a hailstorm with 100 m.p.h. winds and sideways rains averaging 30 inches an hour. Exactly. If you want to survive as a coral in Hawaii, you’d better evolve—or have arrived here on ocean currents already evolved to be this way—as a low-growing, stony coral that can take wave and boulder abuse. And so they have.

There are oodles of endemic (found nowhere else in the world) corals in our waters and they coat nearly every hard surface. What you are seeing is not lesser, just different, and very, very specific to this place.

And, for the most part, nearly ecologically intact. Yes we suffer from overfishing, from unregulated aquarium collecting, from sewage outfalls and illegal dumping and just plain greed and shortsightedness. But despite these things we are holding together out there better than most tropical places in the world, and will probably hold out longer. With the exception of the introduced snapper and grouper—what locals call ta’ape and roi—and some troublesome algae (hypnea) and some new corals that snuck in somehow on something and on which we are keeping a close eye (octocoral), the ocean you see when you go snorkeling or diving has the same organisms in it, more or less, as it did when those first Polynesian settlers hauled up their canoes, took a good long drink of fresh water, and went for a swim.

(Oh, and “Nemo” lives well south of us, in the tropical south pacific. If you think you’ve seen him here you’ve likely seen a juvenile yellow-tail coris…or you’ve been smoking some of that stuff they sell kinda under the table around here).

If you’d like to educate yourself about what and who it is that inhabits our waters, drop the Maui Ocean Center in Ma’alaea on the way from Kihei to Lahaina. No, I don’t work for them and never have, but what I like about what they do is that they show you what lives in Hawaii and just that—not pretty things from other places that have nothing to do with the ecology of Hawaii. What you see there is what lives here and only here.

Here’s a little blurb from their website:

“All of the marine life you will encounter is alive and from Hawaii: the coral, the fishes, the plant-life, everything. Drawing upon a quarter century of diving, researching and studying the world's tropical oceans, we have sought to portray the integrity of these animals and their native habitats so that you may discern a deeper understanding of Hawaii's seas ~ one of the most unique aquatic environments on earth.”

And I’m a little biased about why I think that’s important!

See you next blog—go get in the water!

J*