Laysan Island and its wildlife make slow recovery from exploitation
By Jan TenBruggencate
Advertiser Science Writer
LAYSAN ISLAND, Northwestern Hawaiian Islands — A beautiful, fragrant night-flowering plant, known in Hawaiian as mai'apilo, had a double bloom on Laysan Island on the night of the full moon Wednesday.
It is one of the plants that are gradually being returned to the island after nearly a century of absence.
Most of the worst weeds are under control, and the replanting of Laysan is one of the keys to the conservation effort here, said Stefan Kropidlowski, who heads the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service team on the island.
"The majority of our work now is propagating plants," he said. The mai'apilo is one of them.
The Laysan Island described by early voyagers was a verdant wonderland, with a coastal sandalwood forest, native palms and several species of native land birds along with a remarkable assemblage of sea birds.
Most of that was lost, including all the sandalwood and many other plant species and most of the land birds, during the late 1800s and early 1900s, when humans came onshore to mine the island for guano, to kill sea birds for their feathers, to collect eggs, turtles and seals for their meat and on and on.
Rabbits finished the process. After being brought to the island shortly after 1900 to provide a source of food and the potential of industry — a rabbit-canning business — they ate the island bare of greenery, munching seedlings as they sprouted.
Jan TenBruggencate • The Honolulu Advertiser
When the Bishop Museum's Tanager Expedition arrived for a month in 1923, only four species of plants remained of the two dozen originally known to have been present. One of the goals of the expedition was to eradicate the rabbits.
sdfsdfdsfsdfdsfdsfs
The impact of a few decades of aggressive exploitation of Laysan for its natural resources is still felt today.
A vast sandy flat on the north end of the island still has sand castings of sandalwood roots. It was once forest. Most of the original native species are still absent. Without a full complement of plants, the island is probably drier than it was, meaning the few freshwater seeps produce less water and for a shorter time.
Fresh water is one of the main limiting factors for the Laysan duck or teal, a small bird that eats insects primarily, nests in the greenery and was once a common waterfowl on almost all the Hawaiian Islands.
The ducks disappeared on each other island as egg-eating rats appeared. Now it is found in the wild only on Laysan.
"There never were rats here, which is probably why they are still here," said Michelle Reynolds, conservation biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, doing duck research for the Fish and Wildlife Service.
There are perhaps 400 ducks left on the island, and that's probably near the maximum number possible, given the resources available. The main one: fresh water. Adult ducks have salt glands that remove salt from their bodies so they can subsist on salty water, but chicks don't. They need fresh water.
In 1993, a combination of a parasite and a drought reduced the number of ducks to about 100. It has taken more than a decade for their numbers to recover.
Reynolds said that a critical conservation need is to re-establish the ducks on another island, so a new parasite, another drought or some other catastrophe doesn't render them extinct.
"The risk here for a single population are very, very high," she said.
Researchers hope to move them to Midway.
Also going to Midway is a collection of the native Hawaiian sedge known as makaloa, which grows luxuriantly around the edges of Laysan's 100-acre salty lake. The plant was known for the fine Ni'ihau mats woven of its stalks.
Hokule'a crew members helped Reynolds collect small makaloa plants, which the canoe would carry to Midway where a wildlife team would care for and plant them.
Laysan is one of the several islands of the Northwestern chain that has Hawaiian monk seal recovery teams. Karen Holman, head of the three-woman Laysan team, said that one of their tasks is to be alert for seals entangled in marine debris.
"A lot of the seals have entanglement scars around their necks," she said.
A message for people back in more populated areas is not to forget where your waste goes, she said.
Advertiser science writer Jan TenBruggencate is serving as a crew member aboard the voyaging canoe Hokule'a during its journey through the 1,200 miles of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands.
