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I
am the baby of six siblings. Growing up I was often referred
to as a pest by my older brothers and sisters. "Mom,
he's such a pest. Do I have to take him along?!"
"Quit being such a pest, Robbie." Never lacking
affection, attention or love, this pesty tag never bothered
me too much. In fact, looking back, I admit I was an efficient
little bother.
We
grew up at the north end of the Butte Sink in California.
Once a vast wetlands, it's the perfect habitat to support
a phenomenal amount of insects and other creepy, crawly
things. Mosquitoes, leeches, rats, several species of
snakes, poisonous spiders, and rabid skunks were all common
pests to deal with in our country home. By comparison,
Hawaii is truly a paradise. However, we do have a handful
of critters here that cause folks to scream and pay lots
of money to cover there houses in carnival tents and fumigate
the dastardly and destructive fauna. And amazingly, all
the things that eat up our possessions or give us chicken
skin or welts, is stuff that us humans brought along to
Hawaii.
Because
of the submarine volcanic beginnings and great isolation
of the Hawaiian islands, lots of things never made it
here. Before man arrived there were no mosquitoes, termites,
cockroaches, ants, no spiders adept at inflicting a painful
puncture to people, nor were there any reptiles or amphibians.
Look through Tenorio and Nishida's two books from the
University of Hawaii Press, What Bit Me? and What's
Bugging Me? and you won't find many native species
mentioned. Likewise, a quick perusal through Dr. Baldwin's
Hawaii's Poisonous Plants reveals very few Hawaiian
species. Those long, quick, and frightening centipedes,
like the one that scurried into my boot and painfully
bit my ankle the first week I was in Hawaii, is a Scolopendra
from the tropics other than Hawaii. My first car in Hawaii
was a rusted out 1977 Dodge Aspen station wagon. Along
with an Argentine ant colony it supported a healthy cockroach
population, which I discovered one night driving when
a two-inch long American cockroach (Periplaneta Americana)
landed on my neck. As a naturalist and growing up in a
creepy, crawly smorgasbord, most the pests here don't
bother me. I'm accustomed to them. Unfortunately, for
the native Hawaiian world, many of these introduced pests
have had a devastating impact.
Though
not often considered pests, big, plant eating mammals
in Hawaii have eaten up the homes of native animals over
the last couple hundred years, much like termites have
chomped away at our own domiciles. Like the aforementioned
absent creatures to Hawaii, mammals were poorly represented
here. There are only two native hawaiian mammals, the
hoary bat and the monk seal. There weren't any cattle,
goats, sheep, or other big plant eating animals in the
islands. Introduced intentionally in the late 1700's,
these animals flourished and have become an integral part
of hawaiian life. Unfortunately, for the native forests,
these creatures are destructive pests.
As
the Hawaiian plants evolved here without anything eating
them, many lost defenses against browsers and grazers.
Mother Nature is very efficient. She often gets rid of
things not needed. For example, Hawaii has a couple hundred
species of mints. From possibly one ancestor or genetic
founder, our mints speciated out into three distinct groups:
Phyllostegia, Haplostachys, and Stenogyne. The chemical
that gives mints their mintiness is a defense against
things eating them. Unlike us humans who enjoy spearmint,
peppermint and the likes, mintiness leaves a bad taste
for many critters. In Hawaii nearly all our mints have
lost the chemical. They look like mints, they feel like
mints, and they grow like mints, but they have no mintiness
at all. They're mintless mints. Along with mintless mints
we have briarless greenbriars, nettleless nettles, sumacless
sumac, thornless raspberries, spineless hollies, and thornless
acacias. So when we finally brought cattle, goats, and
sheep into Hawaii they found everything totally munchable
and brunchable and have had a tremendous impact on the
native forests. The islands at one time were virtually
forested to the coast. With their slash and burn agricultural
practices and woodcutting for construction and firewood,
the Hawaiians intensely altered, if not completely deforested
the lowland forests several centuries before the first
ungulates arrived. Since then, with help of commercial
logging, upland forest clearing for plantations, plus
commercial and residential development, these island pests
have eaten up hundreds of square miles of forest habitat.
I
only single out the poor beasts here because they are
such a large and obvious example. However, they are just
one kind of numerous pests impacting Hawaii's native world.
Other disastrous pests here include: yellowjackets, ants,
guava, melastomes, mosquitoes, pigs, two-spotted leafhoppers,
banana poka, rats, cats, mongoose, Japanese white-eyes,
African fountain grass, and of course, me. Any of these
could easily eat up the space needed for an eight-hundred
word essay.
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