-: All right, aloha kākou,
and welcome to our third Thursday presentation
on the Hawaiian honu
take on climate change, signs of a fragile recovery.
Before we get started, if you're having
any technical issues, please type them in the question box
or the chat, we'll be monitoring both.
Generally people have problems with our audio.
So what you wanna do is in the Go To Webinar control panel,
on the right side, there's a section on audio
and just make sure that you're using the audio
that you've chosen, whether it's speakers or headphones.
There's some dropdown list for choosing your audio,
and that's typically where people have problems.
But if that doesn't resolve it,
please type your question into the question box
and we'll do what we can to help resolve that.
And before we get started,
we like to open in the proper Hawaiian way with protocol.
So we will be opening with mele no Papahānaumokuākea
which was written specifically for Papahānaumokuākea
and we'll open this room and welcome you to the space.
And with that, I will turn it over to our regional,
cultural specialist, Kalani Quiocho.
He just took a new position so I'm not clear
on his exact new title, but congratulations, Kalani.
It's an awesome, awesome achievement.
So I will turn it over to Kalani
and turn my webcam off.
Aloha mai kākou
(chants in Hawaiian language)
-: Aloha, mahalo Kalani.
Always a wonderful way to open our presentations.
And also that mele is chanted
often before we enter Papahānaumokuākea as a respect
for that place as a recognition of the deities
and the spirits that reside there and to set our minds
in the proper space
for entering this very sacred area.
So this presentation today is part of our Office
of National Marine Sanctuaries Webinar Series,
and also in partnership
with our National Marine Sanctuary Foundation.
So the national Marine sanctuary system
is numerous sites across the United States
and then the Pacific, including two very new sites,
the Wisconsin Shipwreck Coast site
and the Mallows Bay Potomac River site.
So those have just been designated within the last year,
the Wisconsin one just very recently,
but also on the East Coast, we have a Stellwagen Bank
and Florida Keys on the West Coast.
Well, in the Gulf of Mexico with the Flower Garden Banks,
which has also recently expanded.
So some great protections are going in place
for your special Marine areas.
On the west coast, we have Olympic Coast,
Cordell Bank, Monterey Bay.
Out here in the Pacific in Hawaiʻi we have two sites
our Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale
National Marine Sanctuary,
and our site, Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument.
And below us in the south Pacific, we have American Samoa
and also Rose Atoll Marine National Monument.
So this represents your National Marine Sanctuary system,
the nationʻs underwater parks.
And our site Papahānaumokuākea,
we're the largest, fully protected area on the planet,
fully protected, meaning are our protections are there
in perpetuity at present.
So there are other sites that are slightly larger than ours
but may not have complete and full protection
or management plans or other things.
And this is the remotest part, the remotest archipelago
on Earth, the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands,
and represents islands and atolls and coral reefs
that stretch for 1200 miles across the Pacific Ocean.
In the lower left-hand corner you can see how that compares
to the United States to cover an area from roughly
New Orleans to Las Vegas.
So our hosts today are myself, Andy Collins,
I'm the education coordinator
for Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument,
and also work over at our Mokupāpapa Discovery Center
in Hilo, and Justin Umholtz, he's an education specialist
at Mokupāpapa Discovery Center
and he works for the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation.
So our Mokupāpapa Discovery Center in Hilo
unfortunately is closed due to COVID
but there's light at the end of the tunnel
and we hope to be opening by this fall.
NOAA is a science agency and as such, it's very conservative
about reopening and things like that and wants to make sure
our public and our staff are protected.
Right now we're closed but we hope if you get to Hilo
in the next several months that you come visit us,
we're right on the Bayfront in downtown Hilo.
We have a beautiful 25,000 square foot facility
with a 3,500 gallon salt water fish tank,
many exhibits in ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi and in English,
and also a number of other exhibits that focus
on the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands and what's so special
about that place and why we protect it.
But across the system, across the National Marine Sanctuary
system, we protect all these sites
for their incredible biodiversity.
Often for maritime heritage, shipwrecks.
You may have seen that we just recently discovered
a new shipwreck on when Hōkūle'a
visited French Frigate Shoals or Lalo.
They discovered a new shipwreck site,
a new 19th century, probably whaling vessel.
So we're always discovering
new shipwrecks of historic importance.
It's also incredibly important for its cultural heritage.
This is a image from Mokumanamana,
which is the second island up the chain,
and these are upright on a platform
or a heiau on the island.
And there are numerous sites. It has the highest
concentration of cultural sites anywhere
in the Hawaiian archipelago on this site.
And even today, navigators in Hōkūle'a are using
these islands as training grounds for celestial navigation
passing on the trade, the craft of wayfinding
and training new navigators to revitalize the incredible art
of Polynesian voyaging on double-hulled sailing canoes.
They also provide a lot of shelter for critical,
threatened, endangered species, such as this monk seal
and green sea turtle here enjoying getting away
from the spatial distancing
and just throwing caution to the wind.
And so they provide incredible resting spaces
for these species, often some of the only places left
on Earth, where they can nest such as some of the seabirds
in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands.
We also provide a lot of education as which what we do
at Mokupāpapa Discovery Center,
because if you don't understand why we're protecting
these places, you're not really gonna advocate for it.
So education is a critical part of what we do.
Outreach, using a lot of our volunteers.
We go to events and share about what we're doing
and why we're doing it and engage the public.
We also conduct a lot of research.
In fact, right now we have a research expedition
in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands that's looking
at an alien invasive species.
Well, probably it's an invasive algae
at Pearl and Hermes, or Manawai
and trying to see what we can do about that,
what kind of impact there is from that from that algae.
We also monitor these sites for changes
such as climate change, such as impacts
from human shoreline runoff and things like that
and also certainly alien invasive species
and trying to arrest those before they get out of control.
We also do a lot of resource protection.
This is a great project you may have heard about in the news
recently, they got a tremendous amount of funding to do
coral restoration in Florida Keys and surrounding areas.
So they grow corals in a controlled environment,
in a nursery, and then they outplant them on the reef
and this can help areas that are damaged
from ship groundings or also other kinds of impacts.
And last but not least, these are just amazing places
where we can revitalize our souls, connect with the beauty
and wonder of nature and just have our personal experience
and personal connection with these places.
And we do all this through a lot of volunteers.
So if you're interested in volunteering right now,
our volunteer programs for the most part
are kind of shut down because of COVID,
but we do have a lot of volunteers across the system
that help with things such as beach cleanups
and education programs and outreach
and a whole suite of things.
So if you're interested in volunteering let us know.
But today we have a wonderful presentation
called Hawaiian Honu take on climate change,
signs of a fragile recovery.
And our presenter is MaryLou Staman.
And Mary Lou is the leader of the NOAA
Marine Turtle Biology and Assessment,
Green Sea Turtle Population Assessment Project
in Papahānaumokuākea.
And as the leader of field research,
she's spent a total of 12 months living at Lalo,
French Frigate Shoals over the past four years
where her favorite activities included stargazing
and working with the hatchlings.
So thank you so much for joining us today, MaryLou,
amazing flexibility.
She had to take a family trip and is all the way
on the other side of the planet in Europe,
in the Netherlands, I think you said,
and she was able to still join us.
So thank you for making that time.
You can turn on your webcam now
and I will switch the presenter over to you.
Here we go.
-: Okay, great, thank you, Andy.
Can you hear me okay?
-: Yeah, we can hear you great.
-: Yeah, right, there you go.
-: Great, I think you can see my screen there, perfect.
Thank you for the introduction.
And thank you, Andy and Justin for facilitating today
and Kalani for that mele.
And so already you had a great introduction there.
So project leader with NOAA's Marine Turtle Biology
and assessment program
at Pacific Islands Fishery Science Center.
Let's see, I'm going to try this out.
The first slide is always the scariest, let's see.
Okay, great, so Andy already mentioned,
so this lecture series is a part
of The State of the Monument Lecture Series
based off the report that came out last year,
2020 State of the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument
and it covers status and trends from 2008 to 2019.
So a lot of my talk is going to talk
about some of the research we did during that time
with our program in the monument and some of the results
and what could that mean for management in the future.
And the report can be found
on the Papahanaumokuakea.gov website.
So just as a warmup, because I am gonna be talking
about green sea turtles or honu today,
I wanted to get everyone, making sure everyone
is paying attention, their computers are working,
so I think we're going to open up a poll here
with a little warm-up question.
-: Yes, so everyone can see this.
If you are not seeing a pop-up quick poll,
then exit from your full screen mode and you should be able
to see it then and go ahead and select,
I can see that some folks are already voting.
Why our honu commonly called green sea turtles?
So we've got about 60% of the audience has already voted.
I'll give you another 20 seconds folks.
MaryLou, I don't believe you can see this part,
I'll share the results in just a second.
-: Okay, thank you.
All right, last five seconds,
we're at 77% of the audience has voted.
Go ahead and make your last choice in 3, 2, 1.
I'm going to close the poll and share it.
Can you see that okay?
Mary Lou, can you see the results?
-: Oh, now I see, yeah.
-: Okay great, well, I'll let you respond
and just let me know when you'd like me to close it.
-: Okay, great.
So their fatty tissues are green,
so majority of you got that correct, great work.
So that is a common misconception because they are usually
covered in green algae and their shells do, well,
their shells are more brown but when they're covered
in algae they look green.
But they were actually named for the fats in their body
and which we believe are tinted green
because of their herbivorous diet,
because bring sea turtles eat a lot of sea grass and algae.
Let's see.
Okay, a little delay on my slides here
so I'm gonna keep moving through them.
So, okay, I just wanna orient everyone first
to this map of the Pacific
from the latest green sea turtle status review.
It shows the nesting sites of green turtles
delineated by their distinct population segments or DPSs,
and this is designated by the U.S. Endangered Species Act.
The Hawaiian honu reside
within the Central North Pacific or CNP DPS.
And the population is considered threatened
due to a lack of diversity of nesting habitat
and because those nesting grounds are very vulnerable
to climate change.
Okay, so if we zoom in
on the Hawaiian archipelago,
this is the same map that Andy showed a moment ago.
You can see the vast spread
of the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument.
While honu nesting occurs in small numbers on most islands
in the monument, today I'm gonna focus on the Lalo
or French Frigate Shoals
where honu have been monitored since 1973.
And with that, I'm gonna do another poll,
keeping you guys on your toes.
So the question is, yeah,
what do you see that, Andy?
-: Go ahead, it is just launched, go for it
if you wanna read it. -: Oh, yeah.
So what percentage of honu nest at Lalo
or French Frigate Shoals?
So this is all the honu in the entire population.
-: Well, yeah, people are jumping on right away.
We have 40% of the audiences voted
and it's climbing quickly. -: Well, awesome.
-: Go ahead and- -: While you guys are voting ,
I'll just say,
so what's also interesting about the distinct population
segment of honu is that they're considered a genetically
and geographically distinct population,
so there's very little mixing with other populations.
So it's considered a closed system.
-: Okay, well, I'm gonna give you folks five more seconds.
We're at 70% of the audience have been voted.
Four, three, two and one.
Okay, you should be seeing it on your screen
in just a second.
Can you see it okay?
-: Okay, oh, that was a close one.
Oh, it's a tie, awesome.
Great, so people were learning stuff today, this is great.
The people in purple, the 96% have that correct.
So it's an incredibly huge amount of a percentage
of the population that nests this one atoll,
this one area within the monument
within the entire Hawaiian archipelago.
Okay, breezing through here.
Okay, so pulling back that, pulling up the map again,
I just wanted to show,
all the turtles are migrating from the Northern part
of the archipelago from the Main Hawaiian Islands.
Again, we do have some nesting in the Mains
and on other islands, but a majority of the turtles
are all migrating to Lalo.
So it makes it really interesting population to study.
Within the atoll, a majority of nesting occurs
on two islands, Tern and East.
So that is where we've been conducting
our population assessment study.
Tern island, which you're about to see on the left,
it's a 10-hectare former airport used by the military
Coast Guard and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Today, it's crumbling seawall and dilapidated buildings
pose significant entrapment hazard to birds, seals,
monk seals and honu.
East Island is on the right.
It's three to four hectors.
It was three to four hectors large,
it's more coral rubble and sand.
And despite its smaller size, we do know that it shown
resilience to winter storms for over 2000 years old.
So it wasn't dynamic, it was pretty stable
for at least 2000 years.
Okay, great so,
East Island also historically supported more than half
of all nesting activity at Lalo.
So that's where researchers like myself
have been camping out to monitor nesting females since 1973.
And you can see me there in a few of the photos.
These camps are usually four to six months long.
We bring all our own supplies, we get dropped off
by one of the NOAA ships.
We bring in food, research equipment,
we have a satellite phone,
we don't have internet or cell phones.
And we got a lot of training in risk assessment
and wilderness first aid and things like that.
So it's a really interesting project.
Here the green bars, you can see the number
of nesting females on East Island from 1973 to 2018.
So this is kind of the fruits of our labor there.
And turtles, they don't migrate every year to reproduce.
So the fluctuations between years are natural and normal.
Some years you're gonna more females that migrate,
some years you'll have less but on average,
they migrate every three to four years.
Another poll,
another poll question.
So that graph that I just showed, what do you guys think?
How has the number of females nesting on East Island
changed over the years?
-: Great, we're at 25% already and climbing quickly.
Let's see if we can get up
to that 70 or 80% of the audience.
Folks, I'm gonna give you about 15 more seconds,
so make that hard decision.
Okay, it looks like we're slowing down at 75%.
So I'm gonna give you five, four, three, two, and closing.
All right, it should be popping up on your screen
in a moment here.
I believe we have about a five seconds.
Can you see it now? -: Yeah, great.
So I know that the graph looked really promising
but they were a few, and so that's why I'm assuming
people were answering increased by about 22%.
So it actually was that they are increasing by about 3%.
And that as I'll say again,
is from females nesting on East Island
and not the total population size.
And that's the metric that we'll use for our population
at the moment that we've been using for decades,
because that's the thing that we can count the best.
So going to the island, working at night
when the females are coming up and laying their eggs,
we can get a more accurate, or that's the most accurate
metric that we can get for these females.
Just a second.
And so that is actually, if you read the report
from the monument, that is why the honu green turtles
are designated as good or in fair standing
because the status of green turtles in the monument
is considered good, fair with medium evidence
due to increasing numbers of female nesters.
But there's a lot more going on, there's a lot more play,
and that's the one I'm gonna talk about next.
So after collecting over 45 years of census data,
our program's goal in recent years has been to build
upon that massive data sets as published in 2015 there
to collect as much contemporary nest dynamic data
as possible and then use that data to improve
our population and climate change models.
In addition to the longer full saturation tagging seasons,
so those four to six months I was talking about,
we also increased nest excavations.
So going in after the nest hatch and going in
and counting how many eggs there were,
where did the eggs hatch, were they successful?
So very important metric for, it's okay if you,
it's great if you know how many females are coming up
and laying, but we also want to know how successful
those females on their eggs are.
We were deploying temperature data logger deployments,
which I'll talk more about in a moment.
The use of telemetry, so that turtle
in the bottom right there is satellite tagged
by one of our researchers, and genetic sampling.
Let's see, so the deployment of temperature data loggers
in nests at Lalo are especially important to help us predict
our honu populations resilience to climate change
when faced with increasing global temperatures.
Which for a honu can lead to skewed sex ratios
and even embryonic death, and that's why it's important
we do those nest excavations.
So for example, I'm gonna pull up a graph here,
when we look at the temperature data logger data
from East Island in 2018,
we can see that the nest laid earlier in the season in May,
so that's shown in blue kind of more towards the left,
they're cooler than the nest late a few weeks later
during the peak season in June, shown in green,
and July shown in that reddish brown color.
Temperature is very important to honu egg development.
Cooler nest temperatures result
in longer incubation periods.
So those nests laid April, May,
you can see have longer incubation periods
written there in blue, so 81, 82 days on average.
And they can lead to lower hatch success rates.
When warmer temperatures results in shorter incubation
periods and result in greater hatch success rates
as you can see there.
So our nests that are being laid in July
are sometimes incubating only for 50 to 65 days.
So it's a huge difference between the 60 days
and the 80 to 90 days.
Okay, but honu also have what's called
temperature dependent sex determination,
which is the temperature of the nest environment
during the second trimester of incubation.
So that nest temperature, it's gonna determine
the sex of the developing embryos.
So cooler temperatures produce male turtles
and warmer temperatures produce females.
The temperature at which a given nest produces 50% males
and 50% females is called the pivotal temperature.
And the way that that works naturally is that
if a normal nest not being affected by extreme temperatures
is incubating, then the eggs on the outside of the clutch
will incubate a cooler temperatures will be exposed more
to the environment, and so those will be the males.
And then the eggs in the center of the clutch
will be surrounded by other eggs
and due to the metabolic heating will be a little bit
warmer and so those will be your females.
But we're still investigating
the exact pivotal temperatures.
So that temperature where turtles or embryos are half male,
half female, that nice balance that we want to see.
So we don't know the exact temperature for a honu,
but I highlighted here in purple
an estimated pivotal temperature of 29 degrees.
And we can see how the population might compare
to this global average.
Those earlier laid nests from April and May, like I said,
are cooler and then those later nests are warmer.
Populations where nesting temperatures have already
increased, for example in south Florida
or in parts of Australia, those nests already heavily
female biased and are at risk of losing
sustainable breeding ratios.
So some of those populations haven't produced a male
or have only produced very few males
for several decades already.
And then just highlighting in red there
if nests get too warm , well then we have also a temperature
around 34 degrees Celsius where we know that results
in embryonic death and then your nest wouldn't survive.
And then the black line that's about the pop-up
represents the mean temperature of our control data loggers.
So those are data loggers that we put in the sand
near the nest, not in eggs, not in a clutch of eggs.
And when we use these data to update our population
and our climate change models, we're forced to recognize
that climate scientists prediction
of a global temperature increase of one to two temperatures,
which I tried to estimate there with my block arrows,
that temperature increased by the year 2100
could have a significant effect on the health
and development of these nests
as well as the future sex ratio of the population.
Okay, so in addition to increasing global temperatures,
we're also studying the honu populations resilience
to catastrophic events and how they can lead to habitat loss
and changes in habitat quality.
These events are becoming more important
as global climate change leads to sea level rise
and more frequent and more intense storms interact
with the vulnerable islets of the monument,
as we've already seen.
So have another poll question, because some of you
may have already heard about what happened
in the monument in recent years
with storms and loss of habitat.
So we have a poll open now.
How many islets of Lalo within the atoll area
eroded away or severely damaged since the 1990s?
So was it one islets, was it three islets, five
or none were eroded or damaged?
They're actually more islets now.
-: Well, already 50% of the audience has voted
and it's going pretty fast.
So I'll wait and see if we can get up to that 70 to 80%.
All right, folks, we're slowing down a little bit,
we're almost to 70%, I'm gonna give you 15 more seconds.
So I'm going to take the plunge.
-: Yeah, that makes sense.
-: All right, five, four, three, two, one,
we'll stop at about 70%.
And I'm sharing it now.
So it should just take a couple of seconds.
-: Okay, so I see the results.
I see a majority 47% answered three, that's correct.
Great job guys.
So we did lose three islets since the 1990s.
And I've put a map up there on my screen.
Let's see, I think that's coming back up now.
Okay, so there's Lalo.
There were quite a few little islets before.
So in the 1990s, Whale Skate on the upper right there
eroded, and that was a large island,
it had a lot of seal pupping and resting habitat.
It was a honu nesting habitat.
And then in 2018 while we were there during the season,
Trig on the very top there also eroded away
and that hadn't completely eroded away before,
so that was surprising.
We watched it get smaller and smaller and smaller.
I remember at the beginning of the season,
we had over 80 turtles basking there every day,
it was pretty big island, I know they used to camp on it,
and then that was gone.
And then as you might have heard in the news,
the third island in 2018 was East Island.
So that was eroded away by hurricane Walaka
and it has returned.
It's smaller, it moved a little bit.
It's smaller, it's more dynamic.
It's come and gone between the summer
and the winter seasons since that storm.
And then I just wanna highlight, so in yellow there
we have Shark, Round, Mullet and Disappearing.
Those are very dynamic, they're still there,
those islets are still there but they're very dynamic
and will often erode away naturally throughout the season
between the winter and summer months.
And then so that really only leaves,
depending on how East Island returns the next few years.
Tern island is still there and then we have the Gins
down south, which are very flat
but they're a little more stable than the other islets.
So potential nesting habitat.
Okay, so,
what is the status of East Island?
So that was in 2018, the end of 2018, the storm.
And then we arrived in the spring of 2019,
and it was seven months later.
East initially appeared to have grown larger and appeared
to support turtle nesting activity, which was exciting.
But we, as I feared, it wasn't quite large enough
to support the nesting throughout the incubation period.
As I mentioned before, in a warmer part of the season,
you still have to wait about 60 days for a nest to incubate.
And so what happened throughout the 2019 season
was that the islet shrunk and eroded away
and the turtle nest were being washed out of the berm
and so that's what you can see in the photo.
The smaller photo, there is a nest washing out of the berm.
One of our program's goals is to continue to monitor
this ability of the island and its effectiveness
as an incubator for future turtle nesting activity.
So we're hoping that although it's big enough
to encourage the turtles to nest again,
we're hoping that it will then also stay stable
and large enough to successfully incubate those nests.
So I'll just go through a few photos here
so I can show you what happened.
So the first photo here is when we arrived in 2019 in May.
So this is where it looked promising and we recorded,
we weren't able to camp and set up our camp
on East Island again, we were just camping on Tern island.
But we were able to do basking surveys
and then daytime nesting surveys where we looked
for nesting pits and fresh nesting activity.
And that's what you see here marked in black.
And you can see it's mostly on the high part of the island,
which was the eastern or leeward side.
And then if you watch the photo now, it's gonna move
to what happened to the end of the season.
Okay, and there you see it.
This was at the end of the season,
see how the island had moved and shifted already.
And so what happened was the next marker
is just showing these red dots are where we observed
nests washing out as the berm.
And it's not even comprehensive, we weren't able to get out
there every day because we weren't camping there anymore.
So these were just what we saw with surveys
two to three days a week.
Not only are the honu nesting habitats in the monument
eroding away, but those that remain, as I mentioned,
Tern island is still there, it's becoming degraded
at a rate that is accelerated by catastrophic events.
So prior to Hurricane Walaka, Tern island was heavily
vegetated all the way to the Southern berm line
as seen here in May of 2018.
So keep an eye on that Southern berm line.
You can see the yellow, white sand,
and then you can see the dark green vegetation.
What happened was, so the vegetation was tall
and it was impenetrable as seen in these photos.
It consisted mostly of tree heliotrope,
which is a taller bush, and it provided bird nesting habitat
and acted as a natural barrier at the top of the beach.
So that turtles weren't able to crawl past the bushes,
past the trees and into the interior of the island
where there were more entrapment hazards.
The interior of the island is that former runway,
as I mentioned before, and then also there are seawalls that
enclose three sides of the island.
So that south beach is really the only safe entry
and exit for nesting habitat.
And it kept the turtles in the thicker part of the sand,
closer to the water.
Okay, so here's that map again.
'Cause of the barrier, the turtles in 2018,
before the storm, we're laying all of their nests nicely
right along that berm there on the Southern part
and they weren't going inland.
So keep an eye on that
vegetation, the dark green stuff.
This next photo is from after the storm,
only just a few short months later.
ah, you can see, so most of that vegetation got washed away.
There was sand displaced on the island.
Here you can see the nests that were laid the,
in 2018 kind of all nicely along the berm,
but now with the new status of the island kind of underlaid.
And this is what that looked like.
Here's the photo of south beach eight months
after Hurricane Walaka.
You can see the tree heliotrope has gone.
It's really exposed, cleared of vegetation,
and there was limited vegetation regrowth
and almost zero large bushes or barriers.
So the turtles were free to crawl inland.
Going back to the map,
so I'm gonna show the yellow nests that I had before
from 2018 and I'm gonna pull up the nest from 2019 in pink.
And what you can see is how differently that looks.
So a lot of the 2019 nests were laid inland.
Well, that initially seemed promising
that the turtles were crawling inland,
they had all this new nesting habitat,
there weren't trees and vegetation there blocking them.
But actually when we went back in
and looked at the actual depth of the sand
further inland on the island
We saw that it was too shallow to be a successful incubator.
So the dots there, the points there in red
were the holes depths that we saw
up to 20 centimeters in yellow.
And then green, where the deepest holes that we found,
but they were still only went up to about 66 centimeters
and average successful, actual average nest depths
are usually in the 60s, just average.
So you wanna see ness around that depth or deeper.
So that would make these nests more susceptible
to being baked in the sun or damaged.
Being too close to the surface, not enough insulator,
not enough of a protection.
And then that could best be seen, so the pink dots
were all the nests that we saw being laid.
But then we didn't see as many nests
as successfully hatching.
So we look for hatch craters when the nests emerges,
and these were the craters that we saw,
so not as many and not as many of the regions.
And a lot of the turtles were crawling up and getting stuck
on the island, as I mentioned before,
they didn't have that nice barrier anymore.
Okay, so,
for Tern Island specifically, catastrophic storms
also expose many decades old dilapidated structures
which create a potentially deadly obstacle course
for nesting females as they crawl up onto the beach to nest.
So we saw that a lot in 2019,
and unfortunately we're seeing it again still.
We'll talk about that in a moment.
First, a little update about what happened
since the report came out.
So in 2020, we had,
well, the bad news is we weren't able
to go up to the island.
So due to COVID.
We were dry-docked last year, like many people.
But the good news that came out of that
is right before we went into our quarantine,
we were able to find a gravid or egg bearing female
on Oʻahu using an ultrasound on the north shore.
And we attached the satellite transmitter
and we're able to track their migration up to Lalo.
And the idea there was to try and get a better sense
of what the turtles are doing now that their nesting habitat
has been so greatly affected.
East island was pretty much gone,
what were the turtles doing.
And so we did that in 2020, we did that again in 2021,
and we're very excited to talk
about report on that, those data
as we get more information this season.
Let's see, so it is important to note,
as I mentioned before, turtles don't migrate every year,
they are migrant every three to four years.
So while it's tempting to think that the turtles
that were making the migration in 2019, 2020, even in 2021,
to think that they would know that East Island
was severely damaged or Trig Island.
Because they don't make that migration regularly,
we probably won't see the effects of turtles knowing that
or remembering that until after about 2023.
Okay, so more good news that came out of our pandemic year
in 2020 is we did have a documentary crew that was able
to go up to the monument and their resource monitor
collected one data point for us.
And I wanted to tell you it was a basking survey
on Tern Island on July 3rd.
And I was very surprised at the number he told me.
So if I pull up the basket data from the previous
three seasons 2017, '18, '19,
you can see there's always a peak season
kind of in May, June, and then it,
peels off, gets lower as the turtles migrate back
to the Main Hawaiian Islands.
So this was the number that got reported back to us.
It was 83 turtles.
So it was 83 turtles in July at a time
when most of the turtles really should have migrated
back to the Mains.
It was a very high number, we were very excited to see that.
So that was some great news that came out of that season.
And we don't know exactly if that means
that it was a very high successful for a migrating year,
or if it was caused by a displacement from the other islets.
So where the Trig turtles not coming to Tern,
with East turtles now coming to Tern.
The ugly, so I said, we had the bad, the good and the ugly.
While the team was there in October,
in July and then another team in October,
they saw a lot of turtles that gotten entrapped in,
there was a lot of dilapidated structures on Tern Island.
I think we had a total of nine turtles
by the end of the year that had gotten entrapped.
And so, and remember our team wasn't able to get out there.
So without our team there to mitigate entrapments,
it was a relief that there weren't more fatalities.
During peak season, there can be so many turtles
coming up at night.
But those observations from 2020 really highlight the need
for a more permanent solution to the issues on Tern Island.
Unfortunately, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
and the Papahānaumokuākea Marine debris project
among others have teamed up and I've been working
on removing the debris from the island.
I think between their trip or just in their trip in October,
they removed over 82,000 pounds of debris from Tern island
and they opened up some of the gaps in the sea walls
and created exit points for some of the animals.
Looking back at the graph that I showed before but now,
I wanna show you what's been happening now in 2021.
So we have three field staff up French Frigate Shoals,
and the two of them have been there since March.
So it's the first season that we've had a team
up there so early and able to capture truly
the start of the nesting season.
And they've been reporting obviously
through now, so mid July.
And so I wanted to pull up the number that they have,
the average number that they had.
the lines there represent 2017 through 2019.
83 turtles in 2020.
So I looked at the average from last week
and they had 143 average baskers that week.
So they have a lot of turtles this year.
We're very excited with the data,
they've been getting up there.
It sounds like it's a huge year.
So that's some exciting news.
More highlights from their effort up there.
They've already identified
a total of 641 females.
They had 280 males, they were able to get a lot more
of the males that usually arrive earlier in the season.
They have five juveniles, so like the,
residents to Lalo, which we don't usually see as often.
They've deployed 51 data loggers.
So we're gonna get nest temperatures from those nests,
from the data loggers.
And then as they hatch, our team will be able to get
genetic samples from those nests for other studies
that we're working on.
And I think this is so cool.
One night on Tern island, they had a record 114 females
coming up in nesting in one night.
So that's a lot of turtles work with
for just the team of two at the time.
Unfortunately, they've also had a lot of entrapments.
It was about one entrapment on average a week so far
and four deaths already.
And that's despite the team being there on the ground,
they're not able to keep up with all the animals this year.
And so
the mitigation that the team, the Marine debris team did
in October already helped save so many animals
and it would have been so much worse.
But still after the mitigation,
we still have these fatalities and entrapments.
And very exciting, just a few weeks ago as well,
East Island, there it is.
Thank you, Randy Kosaki for this beautiful photo.
We were just there with,
with the sailing canoe, with the Hōkūle'a
and they got to do a little drive by of East Island
and let us know what they saw.
So on June 22nd, they counted 41 honu which is pretty cool.
And I just showed numbers from previous seasons,
what that kind of compares to
and what that would look like for the season totals.
So for example, in 2017,
47 turtles, so similar to the 41 that he just saw.
And that ended up being a total of 407 nesters
when we were able to do full-time nesting surveys
there on island.
And so this is the kind of information
that we're now taking in and we're trying to tease apart
since we don't have our reliable kind of this index island
that we had surveyed since 1973, East Island.
We now have to move and shift our research focus
to Tern Island, but we're hoping with these more
inclusive atoll numbers, getting information
from the different islets that we can try to piece together
and model what the population is doing over time,
even though we're not getting exact numbers
from individual islets anymore.
Let's see, so before I wrap up,
I just wanted to give a plug for our honu count.
So it's a project that we have in order to identify
the turtles up in the monument.
Our teams use a non-toxic paint to write numbers
with little island codes on the shell of the turtles.
And that way they can see the turtles from afar
and do a census without having to walk right up
to the turtle and disturb it
every time they wanna count who's there.
And so we call it hashtag honu count.
Because these turtles, when they migrate back
to the Main Hawaiian Islands, people will often see them
while they're snorkeling or diving, or if they're basking
on the beach or if they get stranded,
and it's another way for us to keep track of our turtles.
Where are they migrating,
what's their health,
and these sightings are all citizen or community-based.
And so it allows us to have more of an effort
without having to be everywhere at once.
And it's really great and we've already had some turtles
migrate down and been spotted.
So we hope everyone keeps an eye out
and helps us look for our turtles.
Okay, with that, I just wanna say thank you very much
for having me tonight,
and I'm super happy to take any questions if anyone has any.
-: All right, thank you so much, Mary Lou.
We have about I believe five minutes for questions,
and there are a lot of questions that have been rolling in.
I'll say now that we're going to keep all of your questions
and email them to MaryLou and she will respond.
We'll email them back out along with a link
to the recording of this webinar.
So don't worry if you don't get to it.
Let's see, some of the first questions that came in are,
honu are much larger than Caribbean greens, are they?
-: Oh, that's a good question.
I actually don't know the answer to that,
and I would love that.
I didn't know they were smaller in the Caribbean.
That's great, I love to be stumped.
I'm going to learn something new as well today.
Sorry, I can't answer it but I need to do some research.
-: Are the honu that are satellite-tagged,
do they show up on the shark tracker app,
the predator tracker app
so you can see their pathways as well, the fisheries.
-: Oh, I'm not familiar with that app,
so I wanna say maybe not.
They are a protected species, so usually green turtles
and Hawaiian monk seals, we don't publicize
their track data until much later.
So I'm not sure if that's how the shark app works.
Yeah, that's an interesting one.
What is the name of the app again?
-: I believe they're talking about the Pack iOS.
-: Or the tagging of ocean pacific pelagics
out of UC Santa Barbara.
-: All right, I'll keep going.
With the shorter incubation period for later eggs laid,
are there any physical differences in the hatchlings
like size, weight or physical features?
-: We have not seen a difference
and we are measuring them,
so that's a new effort that we've just started.
Starting in 2019, we started a new hatchlings study
where we're measuring and weighing them,
collecting skin samples for genetics
in an effort to look at multiple paternity of our turtles
and also the collecting blood.
And that's our new project where we're going to try
and determine the primary sex ratio of turtles
as they hatch.
Not just knowing how many adults we're seeing
in the population, because it could take 25 to 30 years
for a hatchling to reach adulthood
and contribute back into the populations.
We wanna know right now, are we only getting males?
Are we only getting females?
What are our sex ratios, are they skewed?
And so that's our newest project that we're working on.
And so with that comes the new data that we have
with sizes and our measurements and weights.
And so that is something that we'll be able to tease out
as we collect more of these data,
that's a good question. -: Great.
Andy, how are we doing on time?
-: Yeah, we can take two more.
All right, is there a growth or decrease in aggregated data
that shows turtles exhibiting fibropapillomatosis?
-: Is there, can you say that one more time?
-: Are you seeing a growth or decrease in the aggregated data
that shows turtles exhibiting fibropapillomatosis?
I didn't say that so well.
-: So we don't see as much FP in the monument
fortunately, so on our nesting turtles, on our adults.
it used to be our number one cause of stranding
in the Main Hawaiian Islands
and we do have a lot of stranded turtles still with FP.
And my colleague, Chandelle Brunson would be able
to better answer the specifics of what those data look like.
But I know that cause of stranding at least has changed.
So it is now entanglement with fishing line
and with fishing nets, interactions with fishing equipment.
So it used to be that our turtles were primarily standing
due to FP or with FP at least,
and now we're seeing more turtles with fishing line.
So whether the number of turtles with FP,
and I believe it has declined, the rate of FP
within the Main Hawaiian Islands
or that there's more fishing fishery interactions,
near shore fishery interactions in the Mains.
-: Do you mind briefly saying what FP
is for those who aren't familiar with it?
-: Oh, I'm sorry, so fibropapillomatosis.
It is a virus that causes tumors on the turtles.
Unfortunately it usually presents
first in the eyes or mouth area.
And so it can be really debilitating as the tumors grow.
It's our herpes virus and the exact cause
isn't exactly known but
there are studies looking at if it's associated
with areas of more runoff,
more higher population areas and less water quality,
lower water quality.
-: Okay, Andy, I'm gonna hand it back to you,
Unless you think I have more time.
-: Yeah, no, I think that's good.
Well, thank you so much, Mary Lou,
and thank you for being flexible.
I know you're jet lagged after 24 hours of flight time
but we really appreciate you being flexible
and joining us for that wonderful talk, thank you.
-: Of course, no problem, and I'm super happy.
Thank you so much for everyone for coming today
and I'm super happy to take more questions via email,
like you said.
-: Yeah, great, I'll get those over to you shortly.
And I have a few,
I have a few slides to share here at the end.
Just give me a second to share my screen here.
Okay, should be showing.
So this presentation will be archived
on our office of National Marine Sanctuaries website,
along with all the other presentations we've done recently.
We have quite a volume of presentations up there now,
you can almost take a course in Papahānaumokuākea
by watching all those.
So you can go there and view them,
download the presentation.
And this one will be posted there
after we do the captioning for it,
so it takes about a week and a half.
So look for it there if you wanna watch it again
or share it with friends or family.
You will also get a certificate of attendance
for this for one hour of professional development
and we will send that out the email to you by tomorrow.
And we have another wonderful presentation
coming up in August.
This one is presented by Dr. Dan Polhemus
from Fish and Wildlife Service who has taken it upon himself
to be an expert in climate change and monitoring
all the conditions and changing conditions in the Pacific.
And so he will give a talk about understanding
some of the impacts of climate change to Papahānaumokuākea.
And you should receive an email invite
or email promotion for that in the next week or so,
and then you can register for that talk,
so that's on August 19th.
We also have a Get Into Your Sanctuaries Day.
Every year we do a program called Get Into Your Sanctuary.
This year it'll be virtual again in August, on August 4th.
We're gonna have a great talk
or a book reading by Caren Loebel-Fried
who's a wonderful local author
and wrote a, and artist, and wrote a called
"A Perfect Day for an Albatross"
from her time up on Midway.
And so she's gonna be reading her book
and then we're also going to be sharing some stories,
information about seabirds from the west coast
national Marine sanctuaries and Papahānaumokuākea
and also talking about some of our education resources
that we have available.
And I didn't do a slide for this
but right after this presentation,
through our National Marine Sanctuary Foundation,
there's another webinar, a blue beacon event
about expanding large scale Marine protected areas.
And so that's gonna be a wonderful talk.
If you just Googled
the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation,
you can find their site and you can join it,
it's a Facebook live event.
So if you wanna indulge in another hour-long webinar
right after this, you can join that.
And last but not least, please fill out the survey
that we have at the end.
This is how we know how we're doing,
and if you'd like to see any other particular
kind of events, we'd love to hear from you.
So again, thank you so much for joining us
and hope you have a wonderful rest of your day.
And thank you again, MaryLou for joining us.
-: (speaks in Hawaiian) Aloha, thank you so much.
-: Thank you.