Whatever Happened To … Gorse Busters

posted in: April 2002 | 0

As wave after wave of alien species hits the shores of Hawai`i, advancing like the Allied troops on Omaha Beach, defending against the weeds that made headlines yesterday seems, well, as out of fashion as bustles and leg-o-mutton sleeves.

Miconia, an ecosystem-threatening invader, is the most recent poster child of invasive weeds. No one is suggesting it does not deserve every bit of attention it musters, but in the zeal to wipe out this new invader, what has happened to the battle against one of the old standards, gorse?

Over the years, the state has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in an effort to find a successful organism to control gorse, or Ulex europaeus (also known as furze or whinny). The plant, whose wicked thorns can be up to 2 inches long, can grow as high as 15 feet in thick, impenetrable stands. Gorse seeds are thought to have arrived in Hawai`i about a century ago, in the wool of sheep imported from the British isles. It quickly marched across the high-elevation open ranges of Maui and the Big Island, to the point where today more than 40,000 acres are infested with the noxious plant. Smaller infestations have been reported on other islands, too.

Patrick Conant of the state Department of Agriculture’s Plant Pest Control branch, acknowledges that he has been unable to give gorse as much attention as he would like. No recent studies have been done on the effect of any of the biocontrol agents introduced to control gorse. Still, Conant says, “biocontrol is looking better than it wasÉ The gorse spider-mite damage is apparent. It stunts plants, which turn yellow – sort of like coral bleaching. This looks pretty good, but it hasn’t been quantified.”

The spider mites live in communal webs on gorse bushes. The mites pierce the walls of individual gorse foliage cells and extract the cell contents, stunting the plant’s growth. In theory, the mites could eliminate gorse infestations, but this doesn’t happen. Researchers in New Zealand have found the mites’ population grows for two to three years and then declines dramatically. The mites are best used as one weapon in a multi-pronged battle.

Another biological mercenary in the battle against gorse is a seed weevil. That “takes out about 50 percent of the seed crop,” Conant says, “but gorse is a prolific seed producer.” He’s hopeful the state will be getting another seed feeder – a pod-moth, this time, from New Zealand.

The state has also introduced a moth (the gorse soft-shoot moth) and, in 1999, a rust fungus. “We thought it [the rust] was gone,” Conant says, “but apparently it’s still hanging on. One of our guys just found it again.” Still, he acknowledges, “what’s out there isn’t doing the job.”

Conant doesn’t begrudge the attention being given miconia. “But,” he adds, “there are a lot of others out there.”

The big question: given the state’s past lack of follow-through with such former weeds-du-jour as clidemia, banana poka, faya tree, and gorse, eight or ten years down the road, when a gazillion buried time bombs of tiny miconia seeds threaten to germinate even after every standing tree is down, will the state be as diligent and unrelenting – and financially unstinting – in its warfare against the plant as it is today?

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Conservation Rules For Commercial Activity? Six Months Becomes Six Years

Back in 1994, the state adopted new rules for managing activities in the Conservation District. At the time the rules were adopted, everyone involved agreed that they were flawed by a huge puka – the failure to address commercial activities in the Conservation District. The rules addressed only activities that in some way altered the landscape and did not deal with activities that might occur in the Conservation District, which, while non-structural, might still have substantial environmental impact. Examples would include many eco-tourism-type activities (hiking, four-wheeling, riding, bungee-jumping, for instance), beach concessions, and even commercial boat landings.

For this reason, the Land Board instructed Department of Land and Natural Resources staff to come up with amendments intended to regulate the omitted activities within six months.

More than six years later, those amendments are still an unfinished project. The deputy director in charge of the project, Dona Hanaike, has left the state’s employ. Ed Henry, the employee working most closely with the consultant, died several years ago. Roger Evans, the head of the Office of Conservation and Environmental Affairs, which was the lead agency, left to work for a union. The OCEA itself was disbanded and its responsibilities absorbed into the Land Division in a department-wide reorganization.

Sam Lemmo, a planner with the Land Division who often handles Conservation District Use Applications, said the only movement he was aware of with respect to new rules for commercial activity occurred when the DLNR’s Na Ala Hele (a branch of the department’s Division of Forestry and Wildlife that deals with public trails) adopted rules for commercial use of trails. “That’s the only real new thing,” Lemmo said.

That’s not for a complete lack of trying. The department issued a $286,650 contract to Lacayo Planning for a comprehensive management plan for the Conservation District. The plan was controversial in several respects, and, as one DLNR staffer said, was “DOA” – dead on arrival. “It’s just sitting on the shelf,” he said.

Still, a new move is afoot to undertake further revisions to Conservation District rules, and the department will “try to salvage something from” the Lacayo report, this staffer said.

As Environment Hawai`i has reported, one of the triggers prompting this review was the board’s puzzlement over the fact that current rules permit home construction in the Limited subzone of the Conservation District – but only if the proposed house site is in a flood plain.

No draft of any proposed rule change is yet available for public review. But members of the public who are interested might want to be on the lookout for notices in the next few months. Then again, to the DLNR, which seems to confuse months with years, you could go gray watching…

— Patricia Tummons

Volume 12, Number 10 April 2002

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