-: All right, aloha, everybody,
and welcome to our Thursday presentation.
Today, we have a wonderful talk for you today
about some of the fantastic work
being done up in Papahānaumokuākea,
to remove marine debris and its threats to the wildlife
and habitats up there.
But before we get started,
just a couple of technical details.
If you are having problems hearing,
or your audio generally is where some of the issues arise,
in upper right hand corner,
there's a control panel for the GoTo Webinar control panel.
And just make sure that the microphone and speakers
are set to the correct input and output devices,
whether it's your headphones or speakers or computer audio.
That's typically where the problems arise.
Make sure that that's set to the right setting,
and there's a little dropdown box there.
But if you do continue to have problems with that
and aren't able to hear,
please reach out to us in the question box
and we'll try to help you.
But, first, just check that,
and that's typically where the problems arise.
But before we open, it's proper customary practice
to create the space for our webinar here today,
so I am going to turn it over to Malia Evans
who is going to give us a (speaks in Hawaiian)
before our for opening.
-: So. Aloha kākou.
Welcome too all of you.
So, yes, I will set that space
for that sharing of information and knowledge.
So I'm gonna turn off my camera, and we'll begin.
(Malia chanting in Hawaiian)
(Malia claps)
(Malia speaking in Hawaiian)
-: Mahalo Malia, for opening up our space,
and thank you everybody for attending.
So both Malia and I work for the NOAA's Office
of National Marine Sanctuary System.
It is a system of 15 national marine sanctuaries
across the United States,
four proposed national marine sanctuaries,
including our site, Papahānaumokuākea,
Marine National Monument,
and also includes two other marine national monuments.
So this is your national marine sanctuary system,
and we have some new sites that recently were designated,
including Wisconsin Shipwreck Coast in the Lake Michigan
and Mallows Bay on the East Coast.
And it's exciting time for marine conservation.
Our system's growing and we attempt to protect
some of our nation's greatest underwater treasures,
historic sites, ecological sites,
some that are specifically designated
for a particular marine mammal
such as a Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale
National Marine Sanctuary,
and we are in your nation's underwater parks.
And we are celebrating 50 years,
so this year is half a century
of protection of our underwater parks
across the United States.
And we've had events all throughout the year
and we've put up some amazing new resources
up on our website,
so please check it out
and see if there's an event in your area
to celebrate our half a century.
But the area that we work for
is the northwestern Hawaiian islands
or Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument
and World Heritage Site.
And we are the largest fully protected area on the planet,
582,000 square miles of islands
and atolls and ocean habitat.
And if you were stretch it across the United States,
it would cover an area from Las Vegas to New Orleans.
So it's quite a vast area that we manage,
and these two gentlemen with us here today
will talk about some of the challenges
of dealing with such a vast area
and a threat such as marine debris.
But our hosts here today are myself, Andy Collins.
I'm the education coordinator for Papahānaumokuākea
and work over in Hilo at our Mokupāpapa Discovery Center.
And Malia Evans is our education outreach person on O'ahu
and she works in our Regional center on Fort Island.
But in Hilo,
we have our beautiful Mokupāpapa Discovery Center.
And if you haven't been or if you plan to come to Hilo,
we really hope that you can come see us.
We're open nine to four, Tuesday through Saturday
and often have a special events.
We have a beautiful 3,500 gallon aquarium.
All of our exhibits are in Olelo Hawaii
or the Hawaiian language and English,
and we have a lot of art, interpretive panels,
interactive exhibits, and we're free for the public.
So we really hope to see you if you come over to Hilo
and you can take a virtual visit to Papahānaumokuākea.
But our National Marine Sanctuary system
protects these areas for many reasons,
and one of which is incredible biodiversity
found in these sites.
They are unique ecological habitats.
They also provide shelter for many protected species,
such as this Hawaiian Green Sea Turtle
and Hawaiian monk seal
that are taking a moment to break
up at French Frigate Shoals in Papahānaumokuākea,
and also just incredible cultural heritage.
This picture is from Mokumanamana,
the second island up the chain
in the northwestern Hawaiian Islands.
And these are ceremonial sites on the island.
It has the highest concentration of ceremonial sites
or traditional cultural sites
anywhere in the Hawaiian archipelago
and has great cultural significance
and great importance to the Native Hawaiian.
We also protect Maritime heritage.
Many of our sites have a number of shipwrecks.
Some are even create...
The first National Marine Sanctuary
was actually created around the USS Monitor,
which is a ironclad vessel that sunk off the East Coast.
And some of our sites are primarily focused
around maritime heritage.
We also conduct a lot of research
to understand how these places are changing
and how we can better manage them.
And we monitor them for things like climate change
and other impacts that are changing the dynamics
of these ecosystems.
In some cases, we're actually able to restore these habitats
and there's an incredible program
called Mission: Iconic Reefs
going on in the Florida Keys right now
that is looking at transplant...
Is in the process of transplanting out corals
and restoring some of these sites that have been damaged
over many years of use in the Florida Keys.
We also conduct a lot of education
such as this webinar and program and we do outreach events
to gauge new constituents with our programs.
And we couldn't do any of this
without our awesome volunteers.
So no matter where you are, if you are near a sanctuary,
please consider volunteering for our programs,
or if you're in Hilo,
we'd love to have you come volunteer
at our Mokupāpapa Discovery Center at the doorstep.
But again, these are special places in the world
and I think as we found out through the pandemic,
we all need some of these places to recharge
and reconnect with ourselves, our soul,
whatever way you wanna look at it.
It's just a place to take a break,
and to reconnect with the natural beauty.
So today we have two awesome presenters for you.
Their presentation is called Catch-up and Keep-up:
A Strategy for Marine Debris Mitigation
in Papahānaumokuākea.
And Kevin O'Brien, the president of the Papahānaumokuākea
Marine Debris Project,
he spent 12 years with NOAA in Honolulu
conducting and coordinating
ship-based marine research missions across the Pacific
which also included a large scale
marine debris removal missions to Papahānaumokuākea.
He's led NOAA's marine debris removals in the monument
from 2016 to 2019 and he really kind of saw
a growing need for better mechanism
to conduct that important work.
During his time with NOAA,
he developed the institutional knowledge
and field experience required to safely and effectively plan
and execute complex missions to remote island areas
and now brings that experience to the Marine Debris Project.
Kevin Prioritizes building community
and hopes to create more grassroots interest
in helping to care for Papahānaumokuākea
among the people of Hawaii and the nation.
And James Morioka also worked at NOAA for a while.
I worked a lot with James.
Before joining Papahānaumokuākea Marine Debris Project,
he served as the operations manager
and vessel operations coordinator
for the NOAA Pacific Islands Fishery Science Center,
the Ecosystem Sciences division.
And at NOAA,
he coordinated large scale coral reef monitoring surveys
in the Pacific Island region
and marine debris removal effort in the monument.
He spent over 10 years at NOAA Fisheries
with the Hawaiian Monk Seal Research Program
and Coral Reef Ecosystem Program
and he's had the opportunity to work
at over 40 islands and in the Pacific region,
conducting over 1500 scientific dives,
over 900 days in the field.
And as executive director at the Marine Debris Project,
he co-leads and manages
large scale marine debris removal operations in the monument
and support strategic growth and development
of the marine debris programs.
And he's most excited for the opportunity
to continue his dedication to the monument,
to the Hawaiian Islands,
and help mentor and develop passionate ocean stewards
for the next generation.
So gentlemen, you can turn on your webcam
and I'm going to turn over presenter to you
for our talk today.
-: Mahalo, Andy and Malia,
thank you guys very much for having us.
It's an honor to be here.
I am James Morioka and I'm with Kevin O'Brien here.
And we're gonna jump into introducing you guys
to the Papahānaumokuākea Marine Debris Project
and we will talk about our presentation,
which is Catch-up and Keep-up:
A Strategy for Marine Debris Mitigation
in Papahānaumokuākea.
Let me see. Is the screen?
Yep, the screen looks like it's up.
So we'll get started. -: You look good.
-: We'll get started.
Awesome. Well thank you very much everybody for being here.
I'm very excited to be able to talk to you guys
about what a special place Papahānaumokuākea is
and the work that we get to conduct out there.
So let me get into it.
I have a little presentation outline right here.
I'll be speaking to you about the place,
about Papahānaumokuākea and the problem of marine debris.
I'll also introduce PMDP
and how we get up to Papahānaumokuākea and conduct our work.
I'll be speaking about in-water
versus shoreline removal methods.
And then I'll be turning it over to the PMDP president,
Kevin O'Brien, to speak upon the 2022 highlights
and accomplishments and speak on the five to six year
Catch-up and Keep-up strategy we have
to catch up on the backlog of marine debris
that has accumulated in the monument
and keep up with the annual influx of marine debris
that still continues to come into our reefs and shorelines.
He'll also detail the challenges
in marine debris removal operations in Papahānaumokuākea
and introduce some advanced technologies
and innovative tools and techniques
which we are proposing for future years.
Then he'll kind of wrap up
with PMDP future goals and objectives, how you can help,
and then we will turn it over to question and answers.
All right. So first I just wanted to start off
with just a basic geological formation
of how the Hawaiian archipelago was created.
So there is a hotspot near the big island of Hawaii.
It is a fixed hotspot,
and as a volcano or as volcanic activity happens
beneath the sea floor, magma rises to the sea floor,
pierces the sea floor and gets above the water's surface
to create an island and the Pacific tectonic plates
move in northwest direction, moving the islands.
And that's kind of how the islands
or the archipelago was formed.
And so the oldest island is at the very end of the chain,
which is Kaua'i atoll on the left side of your screen
in the northwest side of the archipelago.
It is estimated to be about 30 million years old,
and the big island of Hawaii
is on the right side of your screen
or the southeast side of the archipelago,
and it's estimated to be somewhere around 700,000 years old,
the youngest of the islands.
And the Hawaiian archipelago stretches nearly 1500 miles
and Papahānaumokuākea or the northwestern Hawaiian islands,
the islands and atolls that make up that area
make up about 75% of the archipelago.
And so this is a graphic
that depicts how these islands were formed.
An underwater volcano pierces the surface of the ocean,
the coral reef forms around the volcanic island,
the fringing reef surrounds the sinking island,
and then a barrier reef protects a lagoon
as the island sinks.
And so I just wanted to show this to demonstrate
that the characteristics of the islands and atolls
within Papahānaumokuākea are very, very different
from the islands of the main Hawaiian islands.
And so PMNM
or the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument,
which Andy had detailed,
has very large expansive shallow reefs.
They're typically within a ring of barrier reefs
where wave energy and water movement is fairly calm
and it has very little emergent land
compared to the main Hawaiian islands, which are very young,
have very young reefs that are still forming
and expanding out from the islands
and has a lot of high wave energy.
And so Papahānaumokuākea and the main Hawaiian islands
have very different characteristics
when it comes to these islands,
which is why where the marine debris accumulates
is very different.
There's a lot more expansive shallow reef
in Papahānaumokuākea
and there's a lot, I guess younger reefs,
and sharper, steeper slopes over here
in the main Hawaiian island.
So the marine debris may get caught up on the reefs
up in Papahānaumokuākea but it accumulates on shore
here in the inhabited main Hawaiian islands.
And so this is a aerial image of Manawai
or Pearl and Hermes Atoll.
And you can see here in your picture
that this has a ring of fringing reef,
which protects the interior, and inside is a shallow lagoon
with an expansive amount
of shallow water coral reef habitat.
A lot of it is between zero and 30 feet.
You can see here in the top of your screen is the deep ocean
going into the barrier reef
and then on the bottom of your screen is the barrier reef,
or, sorry, the back reef.
And this is what the interior of these outdoors looks like.
It's a very beautiful, very special place,
a lot of expansive reef structures
which can stretch for hundreds of square miles.
And it can have hundreds of square miles
of shallow flats as well, shallow sandy flats.
And the emergent land can be very, very small.
They can be little islands and islets made out of sand
or coral rubble.
This is a picture of North island on Manawai.
They're in the atoll of Manawai.
And just at Manawai or the Pearl and Hermes Atoll.
There's about only 80 acres of emergent land,
but nearly 200,000 acres of coral reef habitat.
So that's nearly 2,500 times as much coral reef area
as there is land.
And in these special places
there's a ton of beautiful wildlife.
There's your hawaiian green sea turtles, manta rays,
your spools of sharks, the endangered Hawaiian monk seal,
schools of coral reef fish,
beautiful purple Montipora coral,
pods of dolphins, charismatic seabirds.
And if you look to your bottom right,
you could even see a tiger shark 10 feet from shore
about to eat a fledgling albatross chick.
All right, Malia,
can you cue up poll question number one, please?
Malia: Absolutely.
All right, so let us pull up number one.
And we are gonna launch this.
So your first question, friends, is,
the population of endangered Hawaiian monk seals worldwide
is estimated to be how many individuals
and how many of which call Papahānaumokuākea home?
So go ahead and register your vote.
You have four options there.
And we'll give you a few more seconds.
I see about...
Ooh, a lot of you are responding.
We have almost half and we're gonna close out this poll
in Three, two, one.
And let us see what our audience' answers are.
So I'm gonna share the results with you, James.
So 21% said 800 and 500,
59% said 1570 and 1200,
12% at 2050, 1550
and 8% of our audience said 3080 and 2200.
So what is a correct answer?
-: So the majority of you guys got it correct.
There are an estimated about 1,570 individual seals
or individual Hawaiian monk seals left in the world,
1200 of which call Papahānaumokuākea at home.
So that's about 75% of the population
that resides in Papahānaumokuākea.
So Papahānaumokuākea is a very special place.
There's an estimated more than 7,000 species of wildlife,
23 endangered species,
14 million seabird of 22 bird species.
90% of the Hawaiian green sea turtle population
lives up there,
about 75% to 80% of the Hawaiian monk seal population
and 3.5 million acres of coral reef.
And the Hawaiian archipelago is the most isolated land mass
in all of the world.
And Papahānaumokuākea makes up 75% of this archipelago.
It's also a positioned in the world's largest gyre,
the North Pacific Gyre,
which is essentially located in the North Pacific Ocean.
And it's made up of a system of currents
which really move a lot of water
around the North Pacific Ocean.
And so with the help of wind, currents, waves
and seasonal patterns, a lot of it forms convergence zones
where marine debris tends to accumulate.
And then the islands, specifically in Papahānaumokuākea,
tend to act as a comb
which filter out the floating marine debris from all over.
And this is a map that Andy had shared too.
It has the names
of the Papahānaumokuākea Islands and atolls.
We work specifically at seven islands in atolls.
So if you start from the left side of your map,
we start at Holaniku at the very northwest,
Kauaihelani, Manawai, Kapou,
Kamole, Kamokoukamohoali'i, Lalo,
and those make up the seven.
And it's a beautiful place from an aerial image.
You may not even be able to see
what the islands and atolls actually look like,
but upon arrival,
you'll see that there's a a lot of marine debris
and that becomes a problem here in Papahānaumokuākea,
specifically because of the position of the archipelago
in the North Pacific Gyre.
And so this could be the norm
where there's monk seals and seabirds
residing among this marine debris.
And a lot of these curious animals
tend to play with the marine debris.
And this marine debris either makes it on shore,
gets caught up on the reef,
but it does have hazards and threats
which they pose to the wildlife there.
And just beneath the water surface, it's the same issue,
there's marine debris.
And you can see here, here are four historical pictures
of some of the nets that we have removed here
from Papahānaumokuākea.
And not only nets on the reefs,
but they have significant threats to the wildlife there.
So you can see right here there's a shark
entangled in derelict fishing net,
a Hawaiian green sea turtle and a Hawaiian monk seal.
And it's also an issue on land, as you can see here.
And marine debris, specifically ghost nets,
can cause significant damage to coral reef habitats.
And so this picture shows a net
which had completely covered and smothered a coral
completely shading and abrading the living substrate
beneath the net
and you can see the diver here peeling it off
and exposing the bear substrate which lies beneath.
And along the way,
a lot of these nets snag on coral heads
ripping them off of the coral or off of the reef
and kind of capturing it in the in the nets
as they tumble and decimate habitat around.
(water gurgling)
All right, Malia,
can you cue up poll question number two please?
Malia: Yes, I will.
So let's go ahead, friends, to...
The question is how many pounds of ghost nets
are estimated to accumulate
on the reefs of Papahānaumokuākea annually?
So you have four choices there,
go ahead and register your vote.
Either is it 29,000 pounds, 57,000 pounds,
115,000 pounds or 160,000 pounds?
So about half of you have voted
and we are gonna close this poll up in three, two, and one.
And let's share the results with you, James.
So the majority of our audience said 115,000 pounds.
Are they pretty accurate, James?
-: That's correct again, Malia.
It sounds like a lot of you guys have done your research.
It's 115,000 pounds of specifically derelict fishing nets
accumulate on the reefs of Papahānaumokuākea each year.
And so that's 57 US tons or 52 metric tons.
There's a lot of it.
First, I also wanted to acknowledge
that all of this work was started by NOAA back in 1996
and we wanna make sure that they are known
and acknowledge that this work that we do here at PMDP
is all made possible because of all the the work
that they had done historically, previously to us.
And so as Andy mentioned,
Kevin and I both co-led and managed
this successful project at NOAA,
but we unfortunately saw that it was not a sustainable model
for throughout the future due to diminishing resources.
And so PMDP was created in 2019
so we can continue to assist the monument
and to continue our efforts
to protect the sensitive wildlife
and critical habitats of Papahānaumokuākea
from the threats of marine debris.
And so I'm just gonna briefly talk about how we do our work
and the different methods that we utilize
to detect the nets and get them back out of the environment
and onto the ship to transport back to Honolulu
for disposal.
And so first we charter a platform supply vessel.
This one that you see here in this picture
is 185 foot vessel called the Inua,
which is owned and operated by the Hawaii Resource Group.
And for us it serves like a large flatbed truck.
It's very suitable for our marine debris removal operations.
It's large enough to carry our 16 divers,
four of our small boats and more marine debris
than we can actually remove
in the days that we are out there.
And we utilize three different methods
to locate and remove marine debris,
two which are in-water and one on shore.
And the ones in-water we use a towboarding method,
which I will detail shortly,
and then also a swim/snorkel method.
This is a picture here of a fringing reef
and you can see on the left side of your screen
is the back reef area
where all the marine debris tends to accumulate,
and to the right is the deep ocean blue.
And so a lot of the nets will make it from the deep ocean
over the exposed reef into the back reef area
where we are able to remove it.
(water gurgling)
And this is what a video
or this is a video of what free dive towboarding looks like.
And so we use all free diving methods, breath hold methods.
And what you see here are two free divers that are towed
50 feet behind our inflatable 17 foot Zodiacs,
which are powered
by twin Tohatsu 40 horsepower outboard engines.
We tow our divers and guide them at about one to two knots
and our divers hold their breath
and use wooden boards to fly
through these shallow water areas around coral reefs
to survey for these ghost nets.
And this method is really awesome
for large swats of back reef area
or areas where the boat can easily navigate
and guide our divers.
But when it comes to really highly complex
reticulated coral reef areas like you see here,
then the boat and the towboarding method
is not as suitable.
And so right here you see patch reefs.
This is a very typical patch reef
where you have ring formations
and kind of a circular pattern and you can see here
that it's a lot more difficult for the boat
to guide the boat or guide the divers
through these reef areas so we can complete our surveys.
And so this is where we utilize swim surveys.
And it is just as you would imagine.
We swim around the reefs looking for these ghost nets,
and they could be really large expansive areas such as this.
And just as you'd imagine,
diver swim along the reef while the guide boat near them
will direct them where to swim.
And we use handheld GPS units
with pre-program guide points along the reef
which we plot using GIS, which is a spatial data program.
(water gurgling)
And so this is your typical swim
where our diver is swimming along the reef looking for nets
just with a little bit more wildlife.
(water gurgling)
And then our divers
utilize breath hold free diving techniques to swim down
and carefully remove the nets off of the reef.
And we really wanna make sure
not to cause any further damage to the reefs
or the living coral substrate,
so we're very careful about this.
And this is a quick little montage,
which shows some of our divers removing these nets
off of the reefs.
And when we come across a large net,
a lot of times we have to cut it into smaller,
more manageable pieces so we can successfully remove it
from the environment.
(water gurgling)
And many times once they are cut into manageable pieces,
our divers can swim them to the boats
so they can be manually loaded into our small boats.
(water gurgling)
So you can see here divers are working with a net
that's probably a hundred pounds or so,
they're able to swim the floating net to the boat
and our team manually loads them
into the deck area of the boat.
(water gurgling)
-: Yeah.
(water gurgling)
(team member shouts)
(water gurgling)
And here's another video of us pulling a net
and then this is a first person view of what it looks like.
(team member laughing)
And then we also focus on nets and other entanglement
and ingestion hazards on the shorelines as well.
Oftentimes we have to carry the marine debris
to the nearest access point
where our boats can get near shore to be loaded
and the shoreline often holds a lot of large nets,
which require a lot of muscle.
And it's all hands on deck
when it comes to shoreline marine debris
and we all help to work the nets into the boats.
We also remove shoreline plastics as well
when our work removing the the nets
and other entanglement hazards is complete.
And so this shows our team moving a Super Sack
or a bagstar full of ocean plastics,
carrying it over the water so as not to take on water
and loading the boat successfully.
And then at the end of the day,
this is what our boats look like.
They're fully loaded,
anywhere from 3000 to 8,000 pounds per boat
or per day for our four boats.
And then once our boats are loaded up with marine debris,
we drive them navigating through the reefs
and through the surf channels back to the ship
so they can be offloaded.
Once we are alongside the ship,
we clip into the bow and stern to stabilize the boat
for safe ship craning.
And then the load of marine debris,
which is stored in helicopter sling cargo net
aboard the small boats are clipped into the ship's crane.
And then the net load is craned out of the small boat
onto the ship.
That's about a 3000 pound load right there that you see.
And then once we get it on the ship,
each load is weighed before they're being stored
in open top shipping containers, which are on the ship.
And then we transport them back to Honolulu
where the nets are either repurposed for art installations,
which we'll talk about briefly
at the end of this presentation.
They're also utilized for outreach and education,
or the nets go to our partners
at the Hawaiian Nets To Energy Program
where they're incinerated on O'ahu
to create electricity for homes here.
All right, Malia,
can you please queue up question number three?
Malia: Alrighty, here we go.
So what percentage of endangered Hawaiian monk seals
are alive today due to conservation efforts
like marine debris removal and human intervention,
including disentanglement and rehabilitation?
So go ahead and choose your answer.
Is it 11%, 17%, 25%, or 32%?
All right, and half of you have voted.
So I am gonna close out the poll in three, two, and one.
And let's see what the audience thinks.
Okay, so it's kinda a little bit of a split, James.
We've got 46% think 32% of Hawaiian monk seals.
31% of our audience thinks 25,
15% thinks 17 and 8% thinks 11.
So what is the answer?
-: Hi, Malia.
I turned it over to Kevin O'Brien here,
but the answer is 32% and scientists there at NOAA Fisheries
believe that that's actually a conservative estimate,
so it could be even greater than 32% that are alive today
due to these conservation efforts in human intervention.
-: Well, good job, audience members.
-: All right. Aloha everyone.
My name's Kevin O'Brien.
Thanks, James.
And I'm gonna go ahead
and move into some of the stories and highlights
from this year.
Let's see here.
There we go. Technical difficulties. (clears throat)
All right.
So this year we mounted two full scale expeditions,
two 30-day projects up into Papahānaumokuākea
and we focused on that in-water marine debris
the ghost net snagged on the reefs
and the entanglement hazards there,
as well as the entanglement hazards on the shoreline.
This is a shot of our field team this year.
We had a really awesome team
and for the first time we had the ability to staff our team
with people from all walks of life,
which I think is really great.
And getting people up there who are young and stoked
and excited to do this work
and passionate about conservation
or who may have a connection to the monument
or to the Hawaiian cultural elements of the monument.
And this team came together and was a finely oiled machine
by the end of the season, and just what a tremendous group.
So couldn't have done it without all of these people
you see here in front of you.
Just a couple of highlights from the season.
This video here shows a single trawl net
that was discovered here
plastered across hundreds of feet of reef.
And oftentimes when we find these nets underwater,
they're balled up
into very dense clumps of conglomerate net
but every now and then you'll find one here
that really exemplifies
why we do this in terms of the coral reef health,
because this here is just smothering hundreds of square feet
of coral reef habitat,
and when that happens, it shades out the coral
and it generally dies underneath these nets.
And so this one
was just an incredibly large example of that,
but I thought really important to show you
sort of as an example of the kind of damage
that these can do.
Sorry, I'm having trouble here.
Oh.
(water gurgling)
As you can see,
this material is pretty difficult to work with sometimes
and there's a lot of strategic planning
in terms of how you remove a single net
or how you go about prepping it for removal.
Here they're taking up a little bit of tension on the net
as it sits on the bottom
so that it exposes the areas that are snagged to the reef
so we can carefully cut them free without causing damage.
One of the best parts
about putting together these field teams
is being able to bring people to the monument
who have never been there.
And so a lot of these videos
are taken by our first time field members
because they're so incredibly blown away
by the wildlife that they encounter
and that's so close and in your face every single day.
When we're doing these removal operations,
we constantly have these kind of uluas
that they're like puppy dogs
that follow you around everywhere,
I think hoping for a little snack or something
to pop out of these nets.
But bringing up team members to this area
is really an incredible experience for everyone.
(water gurgling)
I think it goes without saying
that the wildlife up in Papahānaumokuākea is different
than you might find in the main Hawaiian islands,
in the sense that every day
the wildlife is right there in your face.
Not only that,
but the wildlife interacting with the marine debris.
Team Member: Spotted the first one.
-: And so where we may find marine debris
in the main Hawaiian islands from time to time,
certainly it's not on the scale
that we find in the monument,
but at the same time we don't actually witness
those daily interactions with the wildlife
that really exemplify the problem
and the scale of the problem.
So this next video, here we were at Manawai,
which is Pearl and Hermess Atoll,
and just like we do
on nearly every one of these expeditions,
we encounter some sort of animal entanglement,
and in this case it was two turtles
who were tangled in the same net.
I thought it was sort of analogous
to the Pearl, the whaling ship, the Pearl and the Hermes,
where one of them ran aground in in 1822
and the other one sailed in to try to help them
and also ran aground.
And so that's how I sort of envisioned these two turtles,
unfortunately with this hazard.
But our team was able to disentangle
and free these two turtles
but it really just sort of makes you think about
if we witness one of these every season,
how many do we not witness
being that Papahānaumokuākea is so vast,
there's so much reef area,
there's so much of this net up there
that for every one that we see,
I'm sure there's many, many others.
And in such a short window of time,
this particular scenario,
there were Galapagos sharks circling these two turtles
and you can only imagine
it would be a matter of hours or maybe days
before they were either suffocated
or were eaten by a predator.
And so I think it's pretty rare to be able to see these
and the fact that we do means that it happens all the time.
Another highlight from this year
is this year in front of you, what you see is a lifeboat
from the Sincerity Ace, car carrying container ship.
And that ship ran into a big issue
in the mid north Pacific and caught on fire
and the crew had to abandon ship.
And unfortunately there was some loss of life
in the process of abandoning ship.
But at the end of the day, this lifeboat, empty I might add,
washed up at Manawai on C-03 Island
in the late spring, we assume of last year.
And there it has sat
for the better part of a year and a half.
It weighed a little less than 6,000 pounds,
had an inboard diesel engine,
had a fuel tank with 50 gallons of diesel in it
and all sorts of fluids.
And as it was sitting here
on the northern shoreline of this island,
we knew it was only a matter of time before a winter storm
or wave action or something
started to break apart this vessel.
And once the birds and other wildlife
could start getting inside,
it would become a major hazard
to sea birds mostly for entrapment,
but also then hazardous material would be distributed
across the beach or onto the reefs or in the water.
So we put together a salvage...
(software interference drowns out Kevin)
And a bio secure salvage kit
of all the equipment that we might need
to get this thing off the beach.
And it was a heck of a project,
but we're happy to say we were successful in doing this.
Using a combination of jacks, lines, pulleys,
we were able to move this boat
up onto slightly higher ground
where we were able to repair the damage to the hull.
It had several large holes in the hull
that we needed to repair
before we were able to float this off
and back out to the ship.
And so there you can see one gaping hole in the side,
which is about six feet long,
which we successfully patched and repaired
and at the end of the day, made it completely watertight
and floated it almost five miles out to the ship,
towed behind one of our Zodiacs there.
It took every single one of our team
to get this thing down the beach and into the water.
And it was a true group effort but exceptionally difficult
and much more difficult than we anticipated.
But we're happy to say that that hazard
has also been removed.
And that's one of the things
that we hope that we can serve as
in terms of the conservation efforts in the monument,
is that PMDP can be a team
with some additional capabilities
to be able to take care of small vessel salvage
or occasionally buoys wash in to the reefs.
And being able to remove those sort of difficult items,
we like to take pride
in the fact that we're able to do that as well.
Here we are towing it out through the reef,
through the lagoon there,
out through the gap in the barrier reef
and to the ship.
There's a little video.
We strapped lift bags to it
in case it took on any water unexpectedly,
but we're happy to say that it was drum tight
and floated the whole way out there with no leaks
and we were successfully able to crane that onto the ship
and bring it home.
So just moving on with highlights of our 2022 season.
So in terms of the in-water effort that we did
the reef cleanup essentially,
the majority of our work at two locations,
Kamokuokamohoali'i which is Maro Reef
and Manawai, which is Pearl and Hermes.
But to give you an idea
of what our efforts this year looked like,
we removed 313 individual derelict fishing nets
from the reef here,
and that's each one of those yellow dots on the map.
And if you can see the faint white lines
that highlight the reefs themselves,
those are all reefs that we surveyed,
which amounted to 1100 acres of reef
that were surveyed and cleaned.
And that means that almost every square foot
of each of those reefs
was visually looked at by one of our divers.
And so we felt like we gave it
a really good thorough cleaning this year,
which hopefully will keep it relatively hazard free
for the next one to two years
at which point we might cycle back through
to Kamokuokamohoali'i to do another cleanup.
This is Manawai, Pearl and Hermes Atoll
and you can see all that reticulate and patch reef structure
there in the middle of the lagoon.
And again, highlighted in white borders are the reefs
that we were able to survey with our team this season.
And there again with the yellow dots
are the individual nets that we removed.
And so looking at the scale there,
you could see how often we encounter these nets.
And I should add that these are only nets
that are essentially bigger than your torso or larger.
And so, the small net scraps,
the little ones that you can just ball up
and tuck under your arm,
there are many, many, many of those,
but we don't collect data on those small nets
because it's two time consuming.
And so these nets here are the big ones that matter,
that are the larger ones,
the entanglement hazards and the threat to the coral.
So here we removed 60,000 pounds just of nets from Manawai
and over 1,350 acres cleaned and restored.
So once we were outside the monument,
we took this fun little drone shot here
of the pile of net and plastics
from our first field mission back in July.
And those are always fun shots
to get to give you the scale of what, in this case,
97,000 pounds of marine debris looks like.
And there's another aerial shot of that same pile.
This again, 97,000 pounds there.
Just to highlight our full season accomplishments,
like I mentioned, 97,000 pounds on mission number one,
105,000 pounds on mission number two,
which just happened mid-September to mid-October.
And a total for the whole season
was 2,700 acres of coral reef cleaned.
And you can see the breakdown
of how much was net, how much was plastic
from the shorelines versus the reefs there,
but at the end of the day it's a lot.
And then just since our inception in 2019,
this was the fifth large scale mission
that PMDP has executed.
And all told in the last 24 months
since we started running cleanup missions,
we removed over half a million pounds
from Papahānaumokuākea.
Okay. And now to the actual meat of our talk,
the title that we hopefully roped everyone in with here
is the Catch-up and Keep-up:
A Strategy for Marine Debris Mitigation
in Papahānaumokuākea.
So what I mean by that
is essentially that there is a backlog of marine debris
that is accumulated between 2006 and essentially present,
based on our inability to execute this project
on the scale that is required
to keep up with the annual accumulation.
And so when we talk about this accumulation
for the next couple minutes,
we're only talking about the derelict fishing nets
that snag on the reefs.
We're not talking about the shoreline nets,
we're not talking about any shoreline plastics.
This is only in-water ghost nets we're referring to here.
And so here's a little graph
and the yellow line at the bottom is annual effort.
And as you can see back,
earlier than 2020 was NOAA Fisheries effort,
which James and I were a part of.
The blue line shows the annual level of accumulation,
which is 57 tons of nets like you guys saw in the poll
every year accumulate on the reefs.
And so the orange line then is the accumulative backlog.
So when the yellow line meets the blue line,
it means we've kept up with that year's annual accumulation.
When it does not meet the blue line,
then that orange line begins to grow.
And so you can see since 2006,
the backlog has continued to grow.
And I should add that prior to 2006,
NOAA conducted a very intensive effort
and surveyed almost every square inch
of suitable shallow reef habitat in the monument
and spent a lot of money and did a really intensive effort
and essentially arrived at a place
where they felt like they'd cleaned up all the backlog
prior to the 1990s and 2000s,
and that 2006 marked the first year of maintenance mode,
and that if we could just keep up
with the annual accumulation of 57 tons,
that we would be in a really good place.
But unfortunately, shifting winds of federal funding
and limited time on the NOAA vessels
and staff time spread thin across other projects,
unfortunately, despite everyone's best efforts,
we were not able to keep up, which is really the impetus
for starting our non-profit here at PDMP
is that we felt like it was really important
to catch up with that backlog
and then to not only catch up but keep up
and stay on top of it,
which we were not able to do over the last 15 years.
But as you can see on this graph,
the orange line starting in 2021 started to go down,
which we're really happy about,
and that's the trajectory we'd like to maintain.
So as you can see here, the total backlog as of this moment,
as per the calculations
based on the past NOAA data, removal data,
we're looking at 1.1 million pounds or 590 tons
of marine debris that is essentially backlogged,
that if you take that annual accumulation number
and you subtract the numbers we've been able to remove,
we're looking at a 1.1 million pounds or 590 tons
that still is up there in Papahānaumokuākea unremoved.
And so when you take that and you compound it
with another 57 tons rolling in every single year,
it's very tricky and tough to catch up.
So there's that number, 590 tons or so,
but this is over the last 15 years
and so I wanted to talk to you
about what's actually visible and accessible.
And so a net might be discarded by a fisherman
or get lost or whatever,
but at the start of its life, it's buoyant
and it floats across the ocean
and it winds up floating in over the reefs
and into the lagoons of these atolls in Papahānaumokuākea.
And as it snags up on the coral reef, it becomes stationary,
which allows biofouling to occur.
So you can see in this photo,
obviously he's peeling this back off the reef
and there's the big scar, but on the right,
the right hand side of the photo is actually all net,
but it's net that's been biofouled with algae.
And so when that happens,
the net gets more and more negatively buoyant
and as that happens, it plasters itself on the reef
or it may actually tumble down the reef slope
and into the deeper, less accessible regions
of of these atolls and lagoons.
And so once it tumbles off the reef slope,
you also have a lot of shifting sands
in some of these areas
and so we find a decent amount of nets
that are actually buried in the sand.
And these I think are these nets
that have been around for a while,
have become negatively buoyant
and may have gotten into a position
where sand can sort of drift a slow drift onto them
and bury them in the sand.
And what we might see is just a couple of loops of lines
sticking outta the sand,
which are still entanglement hazards,
but that the net itself is buried in the sand.
And so we estimate that that 590 ton number
is not what's actually visible and accessible for removal
due to this,
because there may be nets that may be completely buried
or nets that have tumbled down the slope
and are too deep for us to see.
Sometimes the water clarity is not tremendous
and we may have trouble detecting them.
And then additionally we're suspicious
that nets that drift into the lagoons
and aren't immediately snagged
in a really robust sort of way,
can actually break loose
and then make their way outta the atoll again.
So they can snag but then leave.
And this is a map of a study
we conducted for a couple years here
where we tagged nets with satellite tracking buoys
at Manawai, Pearl and Hermes.
And as you can see these satellite buoys
actually ended up ripping free of the nets,
but then all three of these exited the atolls
based on the currents and spent the next two years
drifting around in the vicinity of the end of the chain.
And so while these were just the buoys themselves,
we imagine this can also happen with the nets.
And so what you have is the ability
for a net to come and get snagged
and then potentially leave.
I think that the chances are low, but that can happen.
So back to this visible and accessible, we just estimate
based on our 15 plus years of qualitative observations
of how this trend seems to go,
we estimate that between 50 and 60% of that backlog
is actually still visible and accessible for removal
and continues to present a hazard to wildlife.
And so you take that number...
Here's the paper, by the way, on the satellite tracking,
if you're interested.
But if you take that number there.
So this is a...
Take a minute to explain this here,
but this is our plan for Catch-up and Keep-up.
What you see in the sort of dull, darker orange
is that total 1.1 million, it's actually closer to 1.2,
but 1.1 million total backlog,
if you just look at the numbers.
And what you see in the brighter orange below it
is what we estimate to be 50 to 60%
that is actually visible and accessible.
The green line is our projected removal efforts.
And so what we put together is a five year plan,
five to six year plan, I should say,
to catch up and keep up.
And so that involves a baseline level of effort,
which we currently have funded actually
for the next four years, at 60 days at sea,
32 30-day missions,
which will enable us if we focus on the in-water nets
to essentially, one 30-day mission
will take care of each year's annual accumulation of 57 tons
and the second mission will chip away at that backlog
by 57 tons.
And so this is if we just operate at our baseline level
of funded effort right now.
It'll take us between five and six years
for this darker lower orange line to reach zero,
at which point we've caught up.
And so this is a nice baseline to build on.
I'm hopeful that we'll be able to expand our efforts
and take care of that and shrink that time a little bit.
So this is just a roadmap for how to get there.
We hope to add one 30-day shoreline starting in 2024
in addition to the two 30-day in-water missions,
and at which point you can see
once that line has reached zero,
then we're into maintenance mode again.
And we hope that once we're in maintenance mode,
we can keep up
with that 57 estimated annual accumulation tonnage
and then focus a little more efforts
on actually tackling more of the shoreline debris,
which at this present moment is unquantified,
but I would say is at least equal
in terms of accumulation weight
to the in-water net accumulation, if that makes sense.
So two sort of sides to this problem,
the the in-water problem and the shoreline problem.
So on poll question four, Malia.
Malia: All right, let's see who is paying attention.
So what quantity of ghost net is estimated to be backlogged
on the reefs of Papahānaumokuākea?
And your hint is one ton equals 2000 pounds.
So go ahead and register your vote.
Do you think it's greater than 100 tons,
greater than 200 tons, greater than 300 tons,
or greater than 500 tons?
So go ahead,
register your vote and about 50% of you have voted
we'll give you a few more seconds
before I close out the poll.
Three, two, one.
And let's see how you folks did.
Okay, Kevin, we've got a big majority of them
who say 64% think it's greater than 500 tons.
Is that correct?
-: Yes, that would be correct.
Yep, 590 tons.
-: All right- -: Of which we estimate.
Yes, of which we estimate 300 to 350 tons
are visible and accessible.
And this is a very qualitative number by the way.
So I know we're running short on time.
I have a couple more slides here
just to highlight a couple of ways
that we might be able to shrink that timeline.
And so there are some bottlenecks to how we do this work.
Obviously the monument is very remote
and it's tough to get to and it's expensive,
but those are not actually our biggest bottlenecks
in terms of how much marine debris
you even remove from the monument.
Our bottlenecks are the efficiency in locating it,
that is like surveying for it
and and detecting it underwater.
It is cutting marine debris into manageable pieces,
very time consuming process,
and then lifting that marine debris
into the small boats for transport.
So we see these not as problems,
but as opportunities for us to innovate
and to create new tools and new techniques
for making this better.
So some of these nets can weigh several tons each.
This is one on the shoreline here.
It might take 10 people
to even move this thing out of the sand
and get it out to the boat.
Some of them are simply too big to lift into the boat.
It's a very tough problem.
And so when they're too big to lift into the boat
or too big to move as is, then we have to cut them
and they're giant amorphous balls of net
where sometimes there's no thin spots
that are easy targets for cutting a bundle of net in half
and you just have to plow through a meter
or two meters of just loose bundled net,
which is incredibly time consuming.
And doing it on the shoreline is easy
compared to doing it in the water.
And here you can see a bundle of net underwater
with a diver, and when you have to do that same process
but hold your breath at the same time,
it's very difficult to tension these nets
and these net strands when you're under there cutting
and it's exceptionally difficult to do.
And so cutting these nets
is essentially the code we're trying to crack
because it would be able to enable us
to, when we couldn't lift a net whole into the boat,
we could cut it into smaller pieces more rapidly
and get that done quicker.
Oh, I guess this was a video, here you go.
Just underwater net cutting.
Very difficult.
And then as you can see here,
sometimes they're so big,
they're very difficult to haul into the boat.
And so combining innovative tools and techniques
to be able to cut nets quicker
with also some tricks up our sleeve
and maybe some new apparatuses and devices
for being able to lift large nets into the boats
without cutting them, we kind of have all our bases covered.
And so we did a little time breakdown
of where we spent our time on these missions this year,
and a lot of it was being spent on cutting and lifting,
well, and swimming as well to detect.
Those are the three big things,
and so if we can even make a 10% or 15% improvement
on the efficiency of those three things,
then we should be able to see a 10% to 15% improvement
on our yield of how much we can remove.
The largest net we ever found was 11 tons for a single net.
And to give you an example
of how difficult that was to remove,
it took us four days to cut that net into four pieces
that were big enough to then tow back to the ship.
All right, Malia, poll question number five.
Malia: All right, here we go.
This is our last question, folks.
So what is one of the biggest challenges
to marine debris removal operations in Papahānaumokuākea?
Is it sourcing suitable staff members,
accessibility to suitable reefs and shorelines,
cutting and lifting the marine debris,
or boat and ship weight carrying capacity?
Go ahead and vote.
I see 50% of you have voted.
I'm gonna close this poll down in three, two, and one.
And let's get those results to you, Kevin.
So whoa, a whopping 90%
said cutting and lifting the marine debris.
Good job. (Malia drowns out Kevin)
-: Good job, everybody.
(computer beeps)
Okay, so just tackling those issues, those bottlenecks,
we've submitted some proposals for some funding,
which we hope will enable us
to dedicate some major resources
to actually solving those problems,
because at the end of the day,
the techniques for removal in the monument
have remained unchanged since 1996.
And I think now that we're running the project
under the nonprofit
and year round this is all that James and I do,
is plan these missions and put together these teams
and lead these field expeditions
that we really wanna focus on making this better.
And now I think we have the capacity
and the ability to dedicate that time to making it happen.
So we'd like to work
on continuing to develop unmanned aerial vehicles
or UAVs or drones with certain sensors
to be able to detect
large floating marine debris or hotspots,
which we experimented with in 2018,
but it warrants a little more work
to see if it's a useful and practical tool.
We'd also like to propose
thinking about diver propulsion vehicles
or dive scooters to expedite swim surveys
to locate marine debris,
which if you can increase the rate
at which you swim across the reef,
you can cover more territory for a given day.
And then part of some of these grants
that we've been working on,
we'd like to really spend some time
developing new robust and innovative tools
to expedite the process of cutting and lifting as well.
So here we have detection.
This is our main problem here.
It's an image from a near-infrared sensor
on a drone that we flew in 2018.
And you can see the net there snagged
on the reef in the upper left.
So I think it warrants more work
to be able to see if this is a way
we could rapidly detect nets across a large area
without swimming first.
Cutting, here's some stuff
that we're starting to experiment with,
but that really needs a real robust experimentation
and R&D campaign.
Cable saws, large serrated bread knife type knives,
underwater reciprocating saws
with special custom attachments and all this sort of thing.
We can do some lab testing here at the warehouse
and determine, essentially
what tools may be really effective in being able to cut net
and develop specific and custom tools just for this process,
which I'm really excited about.
Same thing with lifting.
Working to modify our boats to be able to have some devices
that may increase the mechanical advantage
of our human muscle power through innovative techniques.
parbuckling techniques using cargo nets,
small electric winches
that can run off the battery on the boat,
and then also working to develop new vessels entirely
that may be custom made,
like this just stock picture of a landing craft here
that maybe we can modify to have custom design features
that will really enable the largest of the large nets
to be dragged up into a landing craft type apparatus.
And so these are all things
we're really hoping to be working on
for the next couple years to boost our efficiency
and shorten our catch up timeline.
So thank you, everyone.
Obviously, how you can help.
You can join our field team.
We're putting together next year's team already.
We'll be putting out the recruitment for the team
in March and April, and that'll be a six month gig
where we give two months of training
and then two 30-day field missions next summer
in July and September.
Support PMDP by spreading awareness
about Papahānaumokuākea in general.
And really like to say thank you
to the Mokupāpapa Discovery Center
because I think letting the public know
about this incredibly special place
is the first step in protecting it.
You can follow us on our website and social media.
If you scan that QR code to the left,
it should take you to our website.
And we're really hoping to build a grassroots community
of people who are now able to contribute
to conservation work in Papahānaumokuākea
and be able to really build that movement
of people who feel vested in the place.
I think that's really important as well.
We couldn't do this of course, on our own,
without our major partners.
So many thanks to all the entities and humans
listed to the right.
You have made all of this work possible
over the last couple years since we started the nonprofit,
and you have continued to make the future brighter
for a sustainable and long term
marine debris removal program in the monument.
So thank you very much, everyone.
Feel free to email us at any time if you have questions
or you can put 'em in the chat.
And I'm sorry we ran over time a little bit,
but we're happy to answer any questions anyone has,
even if it means staying on a little bit longer.
So thank you so much.
-: Wow. Really, really informative talk.
You guys do such incredible work.
Thank you, James and Kevin.
All of the questions,
you answered some of the questions that were posted
with your later slides.
So we will aggregate the questions
and send them over to James and Kevin
and then they can answer 'em and we'll get 'em back out
to everybody that's registered.
So we're quite a bit over time,
so respecting everybody's time we're gonna wrap it up
with a few closing slides.
But thank you again, guys, for your time
and the awesome work that you do.
The wildlife, if they could speak,
would certainly thank you for everything
and all the creative energy.
I mean these two guys, there's the brute force part of it,
but there's an incredible creative energy
with their team over there from everything,
from multimedia production
to bringing this information to people,
to these cool new tools they're developing,
to working with many partners to get this all done.
So it takes an army and we appreciate all your efforts.
So I'm just gonna close it out with a few slides here.
Thanks again for being with us.
Let change my presenter here to myself.
Yeah. Okay.
So please, this webinar has been recorded
and we will post the archive to the website
so that you can see there.
And you'll also, if you register, will get an email
when it's ready and it'll be captioned.
So it takes us about 10 days or so to get that up there
but you'll receive a link for that.
You'll also get a certificate of attendance
for one hour professional development for this workshop
and that's useful if you're a teacher or other things
if you wanna put that in your file.
Upcoming webinars.
So I'm not sure
if we will have Papahānaumokuākea Lab webinar
in December, but there's a cool one
on the Art around the USS Monitor,
the first National Marine Sanctuary in the system.
So you can go to sanctuaries webinars
and you can register for that.
And also our work with Ocean Exploration Trust
and the E/V Nautilus,
they're gonna be having some expeditions next year.
We're finished up for the season,
but take a close look at their website for next year
and if you're a teacher,
you can register for ship to shore interactions
or if you're a student and wanna go out in the Nautilus,
you can also register
for some of the really cool internships
that they have available on their site.
And please do fill out the survey.
We wanna know what else you might wanna hear from us about
and how we did and how you might use this information
with your friends, family, and classroom.
And again, thank you for joining us and sticking around.
Have a wonderful holiday season.
Happy Thanksgiving everybody, and we'll see you next time.
(Andy speaks in Hawaian)