All right. Aloha mai kakou and welcome everybody it is 9 a.m, so we're gonna start.
As people keep trickling into the webinar. So we're pleased to have you join us for the "24 years of
Maui Sea turtle conservation with Hawai'i Wildlife Fund webinar. This webinar is hosted by the Hawaiian
Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary and is a great way to learn about some of the
exploration, research and discoveries occurring in our Sanctuary. So during the presentation all
attendees will be in listen only mode. You are welcome to type questions for the presenter into
the questions box in the bottom of the control panel on the right hand side of your screen.
This is the same area you can let us know about any technical issues you may be having. We will
be monitoring incoming questions and technical issues and will respond to them as soon as we can.
Also in your control panel you will find PdF handouts available for you to view and download.
We are recording this session and will house it on our website in the future
and all attendees will get an email notifying when it is finally posted.
All right so I am Cindy Among-Serrao, one of your hosts for this webinar.
I serve as the Sanctuary Advisory Council and Sanctuary Ocean Count Coordinator with the
Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary and I am based on the island of Oahu.
My fellow host for today is Allen Tom, the superintendent
of Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary and he is based on the island of Maui.
So the NOAA Office of National Marine Sanctuaries serves as the trustee for a network of underwater
parks encompassing more than 600 000 square miles of marine and Great Lakes waters from Washington
state to the Florida Keys and from Lake Huron to American Samoa. The network includes a system
of fourteen National Marine Sanctuaries and Papahanamokuakea and Rose Atoll
Marine National Monuments. Here you will see a map of the different sanctuaries and two monuments.
So the NOAA Office of National Marine Sanctuaries is mandated to conduct research,
monitoring, resource protection, education, outreach and of course management of America's
underwater treasures, to preserve them for future generations. National Marine Sanctuaries are
living classrooms where people can see touch and learn about the Nation's Great Lakes and ocean
treasures. So now I'm going to pass it on to Allen Tom who will be providing more information on our
Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary. Okay. So thank you Cindy. Good morning. I
don't know if you can see me with my head cut off like that, thank you so much everybody for
joining us today. If you are having audio problems, I was looking at the chat earlier, just put it in
the chat box and Cindy and I will try to help you throughout the talk. Again my name is Allen Tom.
I want to welcome you to today's talk. We are doing this as part of a much larger National web series
and I think this is the last one that we're doing for this year, but we will be doing several
more next year. We have some speakers lined up already and I'll tell you about that at the end
of our talk, that means you have to stick around for the entire talk. This talk is being recorded
and it will be closed-captioned and as Cindy said will go up online. You all will get an email
notifying you that this webinar has become available. So I just want to talk about our place
that we are talking about or learning about today and it's the Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale
National Marine Sanctuary. Cindy, if I can have the next slide, I believe it is a slide of the
boundary of the Sanctuary so you can see in the red dotted area around the islands of Kauai, Oahu
and parts of Maui, is the sanctuary boundary and that is the area which we do our work.
And in the next slide you can actually see the four island area of Maui County that's called the
Maui Nui area that is where our headquarters is located and there's the island of Maui. Thank you
Cindy for pointing that out. This is also the island where our speaker is from, Hannah Bernard.
And we also have part of our boundary off of the Big Island. So this is again where we
work where we do our research and where we have a lot of our partnerships with other organizations.
Next slide please and I believe, okay so we had a Ocean Users workshop
at the earlier part of this month, I believe it was November 6 and we went over all the various
federal rules and state rules protecting our marine mammals and sea turtles in Hawaiian waters.
So this booklet should be available to you in your attach or your handout section. But the main thing
I want to point out here is here is the 24-hour hotline 1-888-256-9840 if you are in Hawai'i and
you're out on the water or actually if you're on the beach and you see somebody harassing
any of these protected animals, please call this number and you are thus reporting this incident
to the various authorities. So next slide we also because we work with a variety of different
groups to get our information out much like the Hawai'i Wildlife Fund that Hannah Bernard runs.
We partner with different agencies and this is a Tide calendar
that is available to you, that you can download. I know if you've been calling in to our talks
this is about the fifth time you've heard me plug our calendar, but it is available and
unfortunately is only for the tides in and around the Hawaiian Islands, so if you're calling in from
Peru, like Dianne is, probably won't help you too much. But this is just yet another example of the
products we have at the Sanctuary that is made available to the public for their use. Next slide.
Okay we get into the meat of our discussion today and that is that I get to introduce
our speaker, Ms. Hannah Bernard and you know I have known Hannah now going on 27 years. I am
proud to call her a friend because she really is a conservationist and those of you who live on Maui,
if you hear the name, Hannah Bernard you know that is a project that she's involved with
which has important standing. She was one of the early if not one of the few early
supporters of the National Sanctuary here in Hawai'i, at a time when we didn't have a lot
of friends, when people just were you know so up in arms about having National Marine Sanctuary
here in Hawai'i. Hannah stood tall and in public and announced her support of the Sanctuary.
She is the Executive Director of the Hawai'i Wildlife Fund and at the end of her presentation
she'll talk about her latest venture that we are partnering with her on, that should
happen up in the Lahaina-side of West Maui, which will be happening next year. But Hannah
is like I said a leader in conservation here in the Islands. She was one of the founding members
of our Sanctuary Advisory Council, she sits on the NOAA Fisheries Recovery teams, she's a teacher
at the University of Hawai'i, Maui campus and the list goes on and on. So rather than me continue to
exude all the things that she is to us and has been to our program, I am just going to invite
Hannah to turn her camera on and her microphone on so she can talk about her work with sea turtles
here on the island. I should say that she doesn't just do sea turtles but for today's talk she is
going to talk about sea turtles, so Hannah welcome, and go ahead and take it away. Mahalo. Thank you
so much what a nice introduction, thank you Allen. What a pleasure to get to be with you today and
Aloha to everyone good morning, good afternoon , wherever you are in the world, thank you for
joining us today and it very much is us because this is a program this Hawai'i Wildlife Fund Sea
Turtle Conservation program that I am very much just the figurehead of. I have been running Hawai'i
Wildlife Fund since our inception 24 years ago and we'll be 25 this spring. I'm proud to say we have
a silver anniversary coming up but this is very much a collaborative community-based project it's
based in deep in the foundation of education and research and this program would not be possible
without the involvement of many partners including U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, NOAA, the National
Fisheries Service Pacific Island Fisheries Science Center and the Pacific Island Regional Office, DLNR,
Department of Aquatic Resources. So I'm just thrilled to get to share with you folks today
the great work that the many people who've contributed to this program have done. It's been
very much a shared community well-loved program but before i get too much further into it.
I'll just share a moment about Hawai'i Wildlife Fund. We do have headquarters on two islands,
Hawai'i island and Maui, our headquarters are home offices, mine in Pai'a and Megan Lampson heads up
our Hawaii island side of the house from Kealakekua area. Bill Gilmartin, our co-founder
has sort of withdrawn to the big, big island of the U.S mainland,
but he still comes and works with us quite often and is with us every year a lot. So let's focus
directly on the turtles of interest. So I'm going to start with a question for everybody
and the question is: Which sea turtles of the world can be seen in Hawaii's waters ?
All right. Aloha everyone so you guys should see on your screen a quick poll that Hannah just asked
the question, so we're gonna give you guys some time to select all that apply for the species of
sea turtles that you can find in Hawaiian waters. So we'll wait till about 70 to 80 percent of
attendees have voted and then we'll share the results. I think the poll just fell off the page.
It will show up again Hannah. Okay all right, we're at 60, 71 percent voted
so if everyone can continue to get their votes in give it a few more seconds.
Oh All right so I am going to share the results now
Hannah, so you should be able to see it in one moment. All right
all right very good.
That's right. So
are you gonna say something Cindy? Nope you take it away.
All right, so yes indeed, we have Leatherbacks, can be seen in our waters
very rarely, Green turtles, much more commonly and by the way this nice card Sea Turtles of the World
and their ICUN status produced by Divers for Turtles also has their typical weight and length
and some information about how to tell them apart, right there below each of the turtles.
Loggerheads can be seen occasionally, I've even seen one myself in our near shore waters,
of course our Hawksbill, which we'll be focusing a lot of our time on today,
are very rare, critically endangered Hawksbill Sea turtle and Olive Ridleys.
And then I want you to notice in this panel to the right bottom row it has
some characters that we use to identify sea turtles that will become important for you
to pay attention to if you don't already know how we identify sea turtle species.
Which brings me to my next poll question.
How do you tell the difference between our two most commonly seen turtles?
All right everyone. So you'll see your second poll question on the screen
and this one is just selecting one answer. So we'll give some time for folks to submit their answers.
How can you tell the difference between Green and Hawksbill Sea turtles ?
And we'll give it a few more time we have around 60 percent of attendees voting or voted so far.
Okay a few more seconds folks to get your votes in.
Okay as it starts to trickle down we are now going to close the poll.
All right so now everyone can see the results and Hannah if you want to explain what the answer
was. Good all of the above. That is the correct answer and it's good to see what a high rate of
knowledge our viewers have on the subject because this is one of our most important goals of our
program is to help people understand these are the two most commonly seen species in our near shore
waters of Hawai'i although one species is much rarer than the other. So we've got our green turtle
and our Hawksbill Sea turtle and if you look closely at these photos you'll see that there are
some differences. They're a little bit subtle for for many people in the field I see that there are
a lot of people who have a hard time identifying the difference particularly for younger animals
and so we really want to make sure people understand and see the difference because our
Hawksbills are endangered, our Green Sea turtles are threatened on the endangered species list.
A distinct population segment here in Hawai'i but they are still protected by law
however our Hawksbills are very precious so rare in Hawai'i also known as 'ea or hawksbill or honu'ea
and honu for the green. I'd like to give a credit to our former DLNR
Department of Aquatic Resources biologists from Molokai, Bill Puleloa who wanted to be
sure that we held on to this traditional name of 'ea and don't just call Hawksbills honu ea.
So drilling down one more time we're going to see that we have these characters that we can look at
to tell the difference between these two species. With the Hawksbill's most obvious character being
that very pointed beak and that's usually somewhat visible pretty pretty much it's noticeable and
then those four prefrontal scales between the eyes. Compared with two for the Green's which has a much
flatter face and then the serrated edges of the carapace are not necessarily as obvious. So
at the bottom of the photo here you'll see the difference between the Green and the Hawksbill
and for the adults the adult female Hawksbills in particular that we watch over when we do our work
quite often the edges are not as serrated anymore. They're worn down but these features in the face
are very distinguishable but we don't want to encourage people to try and get so close that you
bother them to see them. There's another character difference that's important to us with our
dawn patrol, one of the programs we run to watch over sea turtles during their nesting on Maui. And
that is the tracks they leave in the sand though Hawksbills have this alternating gate alternating
one flipper than the other. And the Greens, two flippers at the same time, symmetrical tracks, very
distinctive looking and different. So we see a lot more Greens crawling on the beach and basking now
and we're getting a lot of people thinking that those are nesting turtle tracks but especially
we're much more interested in the Hawksbill tracks because they don't come up on shore to bask.
So once again just wanting to emphasize the importance of the focus of our work on
both the nesting and foraging grounds of Maui Hawksbill and Green Sea turtles.
We do have both for both of these species here on Maui and then we are part of the Hawaii
Hawaiian Hawksbill's research network that encompasses State and Federal agencies and
those few NGO's, nonprofit hawaiihawksbills.org and Hawaii Wildlife Fund who are working to help
study and take care of and protect our Green Sea turtles and especially our Hawksbills.
So here's the beauty shot of an in-water photo of a Hawksbill and as you can see
this turtle's carapace is not super obvious the serrated edges for this animal
but that beak is distinctive, it's a bit more pointed. You can almost see the four prefrontal
scales between the eyes showing up that way too and so this photo is an important
member this this animal of a photo ID project that Cheryl King initiated in the early 2000s and it's
very easy access. So you can see it online at hawaiihawksbills.org and we are part of a network
that's encouraging people to submit photos of Hawksbills to this online site that Cheryl King
runs. Again not getting so close to Hawksbills that you cause them to leave or cause them to pay
attention to you or to be disturbed. Giving them at least 10 to 15 feet or three to five meters.
So I'm going to back up, go back to the beginning of why Hawai'i Wildlife Fund is focused on these
two species especially Hawksbills which will be probably the main focus of the rest of my talk.
And it was the result of the second death of a Hawksbill turtle laden with eggs she was killed on
the beach. I mean on the road next to the beach at Kealia Pond, the highway there and back in '96 there
was no fence along that road and there is now but back then Sea turtles could cross that road. Why
did turtles go to the other side? Well that beach is severely eroded and they are nesting habitat
for Hawksills they prefer the vegetation line and get right up into the vegetation line to nest.
So this having been the second time that a female was killed on the highway. Fish and Wildlife
Service invited us to help watch over these turtles. Craig Rowland at the time was with Fish
and Wildlife Service hooked us up with Kathy Smith who was then the Refuge Manager here on the right
and we started doing volunteer patrols at Kealia and managed I managed 150 people in the summer of
96 to walk the beach at Kealia to make sure that no more females got out onto that road and got
killed by a car. And then the following year we worked together with Fish and Wildlife
Service to erect the dune fence. The fence was actually designed to help accrete more sand
to help make the habitat healthier again for turtle nesting and for other dune life. And
as it turns out this fence became very successful at accreting sand and protecting turtles.
So without this fence the turtle that came up on the road here I mean came on the beach
here excuse me, you can see the tracks would could have gotten right up through
the vegetation line and onto the highway like the one that the ones that were killed in '93 and '96.
So very important this fence and we hope that our community understands that now we
have a plastic fence that's made of recycled plastic. The Fish and Wildlife Service manages
we helped mend the fence. 18 years worth of mending fences on that beach with the dune fencing
together with Fish and Wildlife Service and now they have taken over the kuleana of managing
and repairing this fence with only occasional help from us because this type of fence requires
technical support to replace and not quite as easy as throwing up a slat fence but it's very
it's very important in preventing Hawksbill sea turtles from getting on the highway.
So again big picture orientation what do we do and why do we do it. The bottom line is that we
collaborate, we conduct research in education and predominantly we're mostly focused on protection
it's one of our main objectives on the beaches so we work under the direction of Fish and
Wildlife Service and DLNR, NOAA, the Science Center and the Regional office as I said here's a picture
of our contact Irene Kanahele and Kelly in between Cheryl King here and myself and she helped us
work with NOAA and manage a grant for us for six years and then Skippy Hau over here our most
important partner because he's on the beach with us excavating the nests every single summer and
a regular hero of our times. Skippy Hau, one of our treasures Department of Aquatic
Resources Biologist and then some of the other partners down below we have Fish and Wildlife
Service representatives, Courtney and Will and Luke Sundquist and Magdalena Kari--Itua
both running both our Green Sea turtle and our Hawksbill turtle program. We've had extraordinary
team leaders, Suzanne Canja, over here on the right started the Hawksbill program, together with myself
and Bill Gilmartin in '96 and then Cheryl King ran the program for 16 years and Luke Sundquist
for three seasons after that. Up behind Suzanne is Rick Long who managed the dawn patrol for
Fish and Wildlife Service for years before now it's the responsibility of Hawai'i Wildlife Fund.
I got to watch the the wonderful presentation for the anniversary 20-year anniversary of Papahanamokuakea
Marine National Monument establishment and it reminded me of the importance of
honoring our kupuna, our kupuna islands and our kupuna in life who have essentially
laid the foundation for us to do the work we do and so I would be remiss if I didn't
mention those upon whose shoulders we stand. George Balazs, former NOAA Fishery Scientist and
Bill Gilmartin, our co-founder and also a former National Fisheries scientist there in
the the photo. George's in one of his favorite places in the Northwestern Hawaiian islands,
now known as Papahanamokuakea Marine National Monument, it's really
our islands part of our archipelago. And then below we have Bill Gilmartin in the center
in the photo with Suzanne Canja (Case) who was at that time the Director of the Nature Conservancy
and she is and Sam Gon are gifting Bill with this beautiful staff that Sam carved
to acknowledge his lifetime of service particularly focused on monk seal recovery.
So these two built the sea turtle program for 15 years, they worked together up in the
the Monument at the time called Northwestern Hawaiian islands running the endangered Bill
ran the endangered species program and George launched the sea turtle research program up there.
Together George and Bill launched our satellite tracking component of our project and so in '97 we
outfitted our first sea turtle that we were involved with with George Balazs
and on the Big island island of Hawaii and we also attached radio transmitters.
So on the left those of you who are viewing this presentation from Latin America you may if you
could zoom in you'd recognize Jeff Mangle who started with us here in the early 2000's and Bill
beside him on the lava flow on Big island and on the right myself and Cheryl King in our work.
We are blessed to have gotten to work with and continue to work with National Fisheries
Service, Pacific Island Fisheries Science Center and with many of the individuals within the
program but especially Alexander Gauss. Alex came to us in 2015 and started working with us
here on Maui and we actually got to expand our satellite transmitter attachments from nesting
turtles to also foraging turtles in water.
And this turtle on the left this this transmitter that Alex came over to
help us attach to that turtle after she nested was tracked from her nesting beach
Paluea and into her nest inter -nesting interval off Ma'alea where she would rest between nests
and then when she left us to her foraging grounds off the west northwest side Honalua zone of Maui.
We've continued that work this summer we've gotten to again tag a Hawksbill sea turtle with the help
of Alex who sent us a transmitter so we could attach attach it to a female the single Hawksbill
female who nested on Maui this summer we named Mama Hua. Hua for the moon phase when we tagged her
which means egg-shaped moon and the zone here where she nested the Kailepoa beach area
and then you can see her track around Haleakala to her foraging grounds in Kahului Bay this was a
last pulled this off the website that I'll make available for you folks to access on
November 24th. And then I just thought it would be fun to show you this screenshot I pulled from
that website that Alex has been loading our historical tracking data and you can see some
of the Hawksbill Sea turtles that have been tagged and had satellite transmitters attached and I
believe this link down here is being loaded it already has been loaded onto the end of the
show or the the handouts or the links section of this presentation so you can access it yourselves
and you can see what's happening with our Hawksbill sea turtles. Not all of them that have
been instrumented are on this database yet but quite a few of them are and the main take-home
message I'd like to emphasize is that in general our Hawksbill Sea turtles do not migrate away
their their their foraging and nesting grounds are the Hawaiian islands, the main Hawaiian islands.
So our work focuses specifically on monitoring tagging and protection as I said before
we've got gotten empowered by Endangered Species Research permits from Fish and Wildlife Service
and DLNR to do this work so and NOAA Pacific Islands Region and Regional office help support our work
as well we actually have have a program that is largely supported by individual donors
businesses and foundations now and we could not do this work without their help.
So we're both running the dawn patrol looking for the tracks early in the season to set up the
rest of the season's calendar and watching over nests and translocating nests if they're
in danger of tidal inundation like this one here. And then we're assisting our DLNR counterpart
Skippy Hau to do nest excavations and release of hatchlings trapped in nest.
But really we're powered by our community by volunteers
without the help of all of our colleagues, the interns, the youth groups, the students, the donors
and the spirit of Aloha, there's no possible way we could have done the work that we've done for the
last 24 years. It very much is community-based this project we have several thousand volunteers who
have helped us over the years and each summer we usually have over a hundred who are active at any
one time. And on the left here we have a great shot of one of our one of our typical volunteer sort of
committed individuals in the form of Amy Lemeo, a photographer and she's standing with Magdalena,
our Green turtle project manager and marine debris recovery coordinator and they have just
gone in the water to disentangle a juvenile green turtle that had been entangled in an illegal lay
net. And then watch we watched over as the lay net was pulled from the water after left
after being left all night which is against the law and DOCARE, our enforcement agents came to
to investigate the case and stop the individual involved and immediately after
during during the process of trying to intervene with the net entanglement.
Our other part of our other team of of long-term volunteers and a special shout out to Richard
Nelson here who's been volunteering for us for a decade putting in as many camping hours as
myself and Cheryl King have the nest erupted. So had that net still been in the water
it could have possibly even entangled some of these hatchlings. Our volunteers
are extraordinarily important, not just in watching over nest but here at the top photo
we had a situation in 2018 and we've had the last three seasons in a row we've had a situation where
every season nests are threatened by tidal inundation and the rising sea level coupled with
the king tides, coupled with summer storm events, have caused these very high surface tidal events
where nests like this one here was in danger of being inundated and so we translocate nests
in such precarious situations if it's within the first hours of laying or if it's an imminent
danger of complete erosion but in the case like this where we might have a little bit of time.
Our consultation with our agency partners resulted in us deciding to barricade and put
this trench around the nest which our volunteers contributed to. So a little bit more about our
programs and what we do. Specifically again as I said we we are now coordinating the dawn
patrol which is essential for the success of our finding the nests, walking the beaches
of Maui. We have nine beaches that we patrolled this past summer typically about six nesting
beaches are monitored by us in any one year. We have Hawksbills in red and Green turtle nesting
sites in green on this picture and the ones on east Maui we don't monitor and we don't
have the resources to do beach patrols but we hope to change that this coming summer
if we are blessed with some funding to expand and support some of our Hana volunteers who already
are part of our team to help us work over there. But we also are regularly patrolling these beaches
these south Maui beaches from Ma'aleaa all the way down here to here to Oneawa or Big beach
for Hawksbill turtles, Green turtles also nest on the north shore of Maui and a particular
individual famous individual nest on the West side but I won't be going into detail
about Green turtle nest and our involvement with them today I simply don't have time
that's another story and a phenomenal story to tell about especially this past summer working
with Green turtle nests and translocating this to save them from being eroded out with the help of
of our colleagues with the Maui Ocean Center Marine Institute. So I'm just going to show you a few
shots of some of our typical and most important beaches. I'm not going to show you all the
beaches that we've patrolled or patrol but most important in particular the Ma'aleaa Kealia beach
as I mentioned earlier where those two Hawksbills were killed and this is a Haycraft beach park at
Ma'alaea and the palm mouth outlet pay attention to this orange arrow over here because it picks up
again over here and then we walk all the way down to Sugar beach this is a two and a half
mile stretch of beach and again severely eroded habitat not the best for sea turtles to nest on
and can be dangerous if they get through that fence that keeps them off the highway
but very important nesting beach in terms of frequency of use. Another very important beach
I'm just giving you a few highlights not all the beaches that we patrol is Kawililipoa in central Kihei is a
little bit more urbanized area and as you can see it's in the heart of central Kihei
and then one of our most successful places for sea turtles nests for Hawksbills to nest the
Oneloa State park at Makena beach and Pu'u Olai. We did have green nesting turtles on Maui on the
North Shore and I'm just adding a couple of shots of some of the beaches we monitored this past
summer Hamakuapoko and Baldwin and Paia Bay and I want to acknowledge those amazing volunteers who
helped us monitor all these nests and walk these beaches all summer and into the fall.
So this past summer these are the locations for our nest in Kihei in this zone and the green
turtles on the North Shore of Maui and again I'll be saving the Green turtle story for another day.
So typical incubation approximately 60 days that's about the average for Hawksbills on Maui
and if the turtles survive the incubation without problems within the nest and begin to hatch out.
Then we also watch over them when they hatch out I just wanted to also put this shot here
to remind me to share about a link that we also have at the end of this presentation
some research that has been conducted on vocalizations that hatchlings are making
and incubating eggs are making in the nest because this was a a phenomenal opportunity for us to
share with our volunteers who are watching over the nest the to have that connection with the
the hatchlings as they're growing and understanding that they can even hear us
human voices can penetrate into the nest cavity. Watching over the nest is a
a long and and involved process and typically we have people around the clock
all day and all night watching over the nest. As it gets close to eruption and ideally the
hatchlings will cue on the lighter sky horizon either at sunset or with the starlight or with
moonlight like these hatchlings are doing right down here at the bottom of this
shot by Ben Caswell, one of our other amazing photographer volunteers.
However we do have some problems with lighting and if there's lighting on the mauka side or
behind the nest then it can cause the hatchlings to go the wrong way and not go to the ocean
and we've been working on reducing lighting issues of beaches on Maui for more than a decade.
And in fact had to take it to the next level with protecting our turtles all
over Maui and even our seabirds in the filing of a lawsuit with our co-plaintiff
Conservation Council of Hawai'i, Earthjustice, our defenders against the County of Maui
because in 2018 these LED street lights were being installed nearly 5 000 of them all
over the island and and the installation started before an environmental assessment
had been conducted. So if hatchlings don't go to the ocean and go toward light instead
which has happened in the past here on Maui they can get run over by cars.
Other threats that we protect the hatchlings from with our nest, our nest watch crew
are native ghost crab and alien predators like this mongoose, right here on top of a nest
which will dig in and eat the eggs. The ghost crabs will get the hatchlings as they're
headed to the water and then as I already talked about we have to protect the nests
sometimes from tidal inundation. Another major challenge to our Hawksbill hatchlings here on Maui,
some nests in particular are threatened with native and alien grasses going around and into the
nest can trap the hatchings. Ideally we get the mass emergence that looks like this with 60 to 100
or more hatchlings coming out all at once which is what they're best adapted and greatest success if
more of them come out at once. But typically and unfortunately more often we'll see one one
or just a few coming out at a time and again this is partly because of degraded nesting habitat
in some of our beaches which I'll show you in a moment and then after first emergence or main
emergence, we start the clock for our excavation for rescuing of trapped hatchlings particularly
on those beaches that are severely impacted by the alien vegetation, which would which would
perish in the nest if we didn't intervene. So we work with Skippy and and we help excavate the
nest here we have Luke Sundquist on the right and Amanda Lloyd, Mandy is our newest project assistant
and she is helping be with an excavation as one of our great volunteer photographers looks on.
I'm just gonna a little video Skippy measuring hatchlings at an excavation and Magda
assisting and myself assisting in the excavation and the release this was just this past
summer. Okay
So Mandy Lloyd made that video for us which which we find extremely important
in the age of COVID we couldn't have as many people at the nest as we've had in the past
or to participate in the excavations to protect everybody's health and so we would make videos
available online so our volunteers could see the excavations and the hatchlings emerging which is
what so many of them are are wanting to see.
Another big challenge with our sea turtles particularly on
Maui, the opala or the trash in the nests and we typically find once we're excavating the nest
that there has been beach trash incorporated or marine debris. Sometimes it's sadly more often
it's from us but it can be from arriving from the high seas. The Marine Debris Recovery Program
that we started was partly as a response to protecting nesting habitat for green turtles
and we have removed more than 360 tons between Hawaii island and Maui and 20 years of work
but that's another story. I'm going to focus pretty tightly on our Hawksbill nesting
program so we have some time for questions and just give you a an overview of where we are to
date. Luke Sundquist put together some graphs from our season. So we were able to pull
information together season just ended the weekend after Thanksgiving so we scrambled to pull
together some visuals for you folks. We've got more than 103 nests that we've monitored and
protected. Tagged 12 Hawksbills and satellite tracked eight of them to their foraging grounds.
That's just what we have done here that doesn't include on Hawaii island or what Alex Dallas
has done it with other prop programs. That's just what our team has helped with and we've
helped more than ten thousand hatchlings make it safely to the ocean this summer. As I said more
than a hundred volunteers were active giving more than three thousand hours patrolling our beaches
watching over nests typically they spend between 100 and 200 hours per person some of these
volunteers, our top volunteers will spend that much time on the beach in the hot sun or camping
all night. We had five Hawksbill nests with 900 eggs produced and a 450 hatchlings emerging
which gives us about a 50 percent hatching success this summer. So we added that to
the '96 all the way back to '96 data to look at some of the long-term trends. I want to call
your attention to the beaches on the left, they're color-coded. So this purple area here these are
Oneloa or Big Beach state park and Makena these are hatching success I mean hatchling
successes over time with three turtles these are the turtle names on the left and then
Palau'ea another one of our important nesting beaches. Kalepolepo, Kawililipoa and Kealia, with having some
zero success so obviously some very important differences between our our nesting beaches
and mean annual hatching success over the years highly variable variable but we have only one
or two Hawksbills nesting per year so we have a very small sample size. Super rare
events and super rare turtles but we do we are able to
detect some trends and a slight increase in clutch size with carapace length of the female
and then the mean number of eggs by clutch in terms of order laid beginning to look like
a slight decrease by the end of the season by the fifth clutch and the mean
incubation time to first emergence by nesting beach big differences between Kawililipoa and
Little and Big Beach Oneloa state park at Makena these beaches are very different with
one as I showed you in the earlier slides being wide white sandy beach and Kawililipoa being inundated
and overgrown with native and mostly native grasses because it's a State beach reserve that is
being managed for recovery of native plants as well as turtles. And then the big picture
of our Hawksbills. How many females and how many nests per year and it's small as you can see
typically at averages about one female per year and the nests typically the average is
about four with as many as 12 in a particular year very small very small number of Hawksbills
on Maui. And I'm going to quickly jump over to our Green turtle project because I see I've
almost run out of time and I want to leave time for questions but we do have another important
program that volunteers can participate in and we would love people who are on this
webinar who want to volunteer to help protect turtles to help us we can do it ourselves by
behaving with respect around green turtles which are increasing in numbers on our beaches and
they're basking. They're coming up on the beaches to rest, to warm up, to avoid predators, to conserve
energy more and more and one of our most important beaches for this is Ho'okipa and we kept that name
secret for many years because we didn't want to encourage people to go there but since
that's that's not a secret anymore and that beach location has gone viral
we want people to understand that we have been protecting and watching over
the green turtles there since 2008 when Cheryl King initiated a photo ID project which we still
have students working on today. We documented more than 700 people a day coming to this beach
just to view the turtles with up to 184 green turtles basking at one time yeah
a lot. So volunteers, interns, team member Magdalena Peneatua over here
are essential for our ability to help educate people at this site we also are participants in
the stranding network through the Marine Ocean, the Maui Ocean Center Marine Institute
and we have initiated a couple of additional projects there to scan for pit tags on Green
turtles and photo ID as I said together with a couple of former students from Italy. Two quick
quick updates about where we're going. We have a beautiful sign that has just
been finished and to be placed on the area of Hamakua coast on Big island, Hawaii island
and our team over there headed up by Megan Lamson and Bill conceived of this sign and
Patrick Ching, our renowned and and good friend marine and wildlife artist of Hawaii
designed the sign and was funded by a grant from Hawaii County and so we're trying to
help educate the world about the presence of Hawksbills. We're not as secret about where they
are as we used to be because if people don't know they can't help. We also have produced curriculum
one of our newest projects is Hawksbill sea turtle curriculum, which we've produced
and is available online at this site and also this link up yet in the handouts at the end of
the presentation and so it's a seventh seventh and eighth grade level curriculum and narrated
by one of our team members on Hawaii island Patty Barnes, so you can access that there.
And finally upcoming we have a big project in the works as Allen mentioned. We are going to be
opening a Wildlife Discovery Center, Hawai'i Wildlife Discovery Center at Whalers Village in
Ka'anapali and here's the the Center. My cursor is on the building in the background the makai side
of the lot and that top floor is going to be half of which 5000 square feet
will be the Discovery Center. So we'll have another great outlet for teaching about
our Sea turtles, in collaboration with our Humpback Whale Sanctuary and all of our partners
and the Whalers Village, Brookfield Properties sponsoring it. It will also be decked out with
beautiful murals by Patrick Ching both inside and outside and finally I'll just bounce through and
give you so I give folks time for questions how you can help sea turtles our friends at
Divers for turtles.com published this list of steps you can take to help protect turtles.
Go ahead and visit tooraretowear.org to learn more about how to avoid buying turtle shell
products, clean a beach, reduce your plastic, dive turtle friendly and take care of the reef.
You can donate to their sea turtle project or you can donate to ours. All turtle projects
are very labor intensive we we really need all the help we can get all over the world.
Locally sign up to volunteer with us, clean up your beaches and reefs and learn, educate, vote, take care
of what you love, follow us, join us in our social media to learn more about events that we're
hosting and how you can help us. You can go to these links to learn more and Mahalo for your time.
Mahalo Hannah, All right so we're kind of we probably have time for just one question but folks feel free
to submit more questions into the question box and we can send those questions over to Hannah
and we will share them with you all via email that you registered with for this webinar. But
for that one question Hannah it is
okay one moment
Okay. Could you let us know the population size of Hawai'i Hawksbill and Green Sea turtles.
So our best estimate of the population size and that is absolutely a research project that is
continuing and underway with our colleagues at Pacific Island Fisheries Science Center
it's estimated there may be around 100 nesting females in our Hawaiian Hawksbill population
probably the smallest most isolated sea turtle population in the world and but maybe the
most important in the Central Pacific. The Green turtle population is increasing although it is
the future is very uncertain because of the loss of the most important nesting grounds up in
the Papahanamokuakea Marine Monument with Hurricane Wailaka in 2018, we lost
significant nesting habitat at Tern island but the population of Green turtles
but that the the last estimate that I had heard was around about close to a thousand nesting
per season and again this is pre-Wailaka when the habitat up there was healthy
but I defer to my colleagues on the population estimates those are definitely challenging
numbers and we're still very much working on that answer.
Awesome. Thank you Hannah and we did get a few other questions but we'll save them and we'll
send it to Hannah and we'll get all the answers back to you folks hopefully within a week or so
but now i'm going to pass it on to Allen Tom who will finish off our webinar. Okay so again I want
to thank Hannah Bernard for that wonderful talk. I forgot to mention she was named one of
Maui's most influential people, people who made a difference and I think for those of you who are
on the webinar you see why she was awarded that title and Hannah you were such a hit based on all
the questions I'm seeing in the chat box, I'm going to invite you back maybe next fall you could talk
about dolphins or some of the other work you do because I know this is just the tip of the iceberg
on what you do. And so let me just wrap up folks don't hang up just yet I want to mention that all
of these webinars we're doing including this one today is then has been recorded as soon as
I get around to closed captioning it it will get onto the webinar archive that you see listed here
and you will all be getting those of you who registered getting a email notification that
the webinar is available so all the information that Hannah just mentioned will be in this webinar.
Next slide. And I would say as we are waiting for the next slide, okay you will also be getting a
Certificate of Attendance so folks that attended this webinar, we'll get this certificate hopefully
within the next 24 hours, we will be sending this out I believe this also counts as one credit of
informational webinar series training, so you get so one contact hour of professional development is
also available to you from attending this webinar. Next slide please. And we do want you to take a
survey which is attached to this webinar so please let us know your thoughts about future topics,
what you did or didn't like about the webinar, I couldn't hear, it was too fast, whatever it might be,
please let us know because we are working to make these webinars more useful for people. Next Slide.
And I will also say that we do have some webinars coming up. In January we have Jane Au,
she will talk about the Hawaiian religious understandings of the ocean, the importance
of the ocean to Native Hawaiians. And then followed by that in February we have Maka'ala Kaaumoana,
she is also a sanctuary advisory council member, talking about a place on Kauai, Hanalei. And
she'll talk about the watershed about that area. We did just add another webinar on March 24th,
Dr. Heather Ward will talk about he'e or cephalopods or octopi, so please join us for those.
Again I want to thank Hannah, it's so interesting that humans have been responsible for the
extinction and threatened status of a lot of animals and so it's great to see humans now making
a difference in bringing those animals back from extinction, so people like Hannah Bernard thank
you so much. And again thank you to all of you for joining us because your interest is going to help
this species recover and if you're interested Hawaii Wildlife Fund go to that home page you
can talk to Hannah directly. I know many of you have asked how can you volunteer and participate,
go to the Hawaii Wildlife Fund homepage and that's where you will find Miss Bernard. So again
thank you all for attending and thank you Hannah and we look forward to future workshops.
Bye Bye, Aloha.