Saving Coral on Coconut Island

One by one, egg sacs and sperm cloud the water around the spawning corals. Overhead looms both a full moon and the watchful eyes of pHd students at the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology on Coconut Island in Kaneohe Bay.

“Yeah! You can see them! They come floating out,” Mariana laughed Wednesday night at hula class, describing her research. Then she invited us to come see!

Mariana is one of several students studying how climate change affects coral colonies. Rising sea temperatures kill off the algae that lives within the coral (and provides 90 percent of its food), leaving the coral to starve to death. That’s coral bleaching.

If the coral and algae are exposed to high temperatures little by little, can they acclimate? That’s one question they’re trying to answer.

Baby shark (do do do do do do do), baby shark (do do do do do do do)

Mariana showed us some of her specimens, then we continued around Coconut Island to the touch tanks.

Isaac explored a touch tank: sea cucumbers can invert their stomachs! Another type of sea cucumber looks like an octopus tentacle! Cowries can blob out and cover their shells with their bodies!? We learned all kinds of things at the Hotel Cowrifornia (I wish I came up with that. The guy who studies cowries taped a sign up over his specimens’ tanks).

We saw collector urchins and feather duster worms—creatures we’ve only seen in books!

And we saw the shark specialists feeding the shark for a bunch of visiting professors. FRENZY. Fascinating! Circling fins and splashing tails—what were they feeding them? Broken dreams? Faculty who failed to make tenure in the recommended time? Students? It was pretty intense. Later Eloise stuck her hand in the water. She’s up to the challenge.

Driving around Makapu’U I think, “This is the most beautiful place in the world.” Then at Kailua Beach at sunset I think that again, then again while driving to the North Shore while rainbows dance across the road.

But circling Coconut Island, with the Kaneohe Sandbar stretching off into the distance, Chris’ squadron across the water, the clearest waters I’ve seen in Hawaii, coral falling away into multi-blue layers beneath the collapsing Bridge to Nowhere—now THIS is the prettiest spot in Hawaii.

Right? Am I right? Probably not. Every day I can’t get over how beautiful Hawaii is. It astonishes me every day. Even if we aren’t taking a boat ride to an island to see sharks and corals.

BY THE WAY, this is the island where Gilligan’s Island was filmed, and it used to be a private island with an elephant and a giraffe or something, and someone tried to make it a resort but the proximity to the flight line and base was an issue, so now it’s a university. As it should be. I told my kids I would be veeeeeeeeery proud of them if they wanted to work hard and come study here and maybe save the world. I may or may not visit too often. Maybe not if Eloise is training attack sharks or something.