Research, Conservation, and Education Updates

Education Department
 

It’s been an exciting few months in the education department!  We concluded another successful Keiki Whalewatch season.  This year we are proud to have had over 2,400 students participate in the program.  The generous support of our members and donors allows us to continue to run the program at a subsidized rate for students and offer scholarships through our No Child Left Indoors Scholarship program.  We hope to increase the reach of the program and the number of participants in the 2018 season.

Summer has already begun and the summer session of Ocean Camp is in full swing.  We had four exciting, fun-filled weeks of Ocean Camp so far in June, with 5 more to go before school resumes again in early August. Our first week of Ocean Camp, themed “Stewards of the Sea,” helped us learn about the ocean, its inhabitants, and how we can help by being stewards of the sea.  Among their daily field trips, campers participated in a coastal cleanup in honor of World Oceans Day, and collected and submitted data on marine debris.  The second week of Ocean Camp, themed “Surf’s Up!” immersed campers in marine life found in the surf zone, coastal processes, and of course surfing lessons.  The third week of camp, themed “Ahoy Matey!” had campers using nautical terms as they learned about ocean exploration past and present.  A highlight of this week was paddling in outrigger canoes with Maui Canoe Club.  During the fourth week of camp, themed “Marine Cuisine,” campers learned all about who eats whom in the ocean and even tasted some seafood. The week included an exciting field trip to the Maui Dragonfruit Farm, where campers participated in a farm tour, taste-tested some of the fruits grown there, and had adventures on the zipline and in the aqua ball.

We are looking forward to the coming weeks, with lots more fun and learning to come!

 

 

The research team has completed 10 survey days since our last newsletter, covering 662 nautical miles. Over 300 pieces of marine debris were collected during these transect surveys, including hard plastics, balloons, glass bottles, buoys, Styrofoam, hats, and plastic packaging. We also encountered odontocetes five times, with two sightings of bottlenose dolphins and three sightings of pantropical spotted dolphins. One of our bottlenose dolphin pods in April was seen swimming along with a pair of humpback whales. Although no one knows what may cause different species to interact, one thing is certain: it’s always interesting to watch.

          

Our research staff and interns have been hard at work processing flukes from the 2016 Australia field season. Twenty four individual whales have been cataloged so far, and six of these were matches to animals in the South Pacific Catalog. Five of the matches were females who had calves in 2016, and all five represented the first time PWF had seen any of these females with a calf. The remaining match is an animal of unknown sex who was first sighted in 1989, making it at least 27 years old during the 2016 field season.

The research department has partnered with TerraCycle to recycle all of the hard plastics we collect during our marine debris research. This new partnership will allow us to recycle nearly 70% of the marine debris we collect. Ultimately we would like to see local facilities capable of accepting a larger range of plastics to facilitate recycling efforts, but companies like this are great at filling in the gaps.

PWF also participates in the Adopt a Highway program, and we conduct quarterly cleanups of a 2-mile section of the Honoapiilani Highway. On our most recent cleanup, PWF staff and interns filled 14 large bags with debris from the highway. Although some larger pieces were collected, most of the trash consisted of single-use items such as cigarette butts and plastic food and beverage containers.

Since our last newsletter, over 75 volunteers have picked up 6,083 debris items at nine sites along Maui’s coastline, including locations in west, central, and south areas of Maui. Items of note include carpet pieces, mattresses, tires, and even a barbecue grill. Among the efforts was a large-scale cleanup of a beach near Olowalu, organized as part of a giving back event by the Dell Corporation. In total, 4,144 items were collected by 53 volunteers at the Dell cleanup event. Beach cleanups completed through PWF’s Volunteer on Vacation program allow the research department to monitor debris accumulation as part of the Maui Coastal Marine Debris Monitoring Program.

 

Our researchers are delighted to announce that, due to a successful fundraising campaign this spring, we were able to purchase a new pick-up truck to trailer our research boat. The new truck is making it much easier for our team to launch and retrieve Ocean Protector and we would like to extend our gratitude to everyone who contributed towards this campaign.