CONSERVATION
Coconut Island’s fishponds and sheltered bays were created by owner Christian Holmes in the early 20th century by dredging parts of the reef and using the fill, along with material from the sandbars in Ka- ne‘ohe Bay, to expand the dry land.
At the core of her research is a quest to understand whether there are differences between younger, smaller corals and larger, older coral colonies. Essentially, she’s trying to answer the question of whether coral keiki look like their parents, and if some keiki have advantages based on the age of the parent coral or the site where they live. To find the answers, she knew she needed to sample a range of different corals at exactly the same time when they spawned and to do this she needed a lot of help. With the assistance of the U.H. Sea Grant college program, she sought help from the community and was pleasantly surprised at the great response she got. A medley of people showed up to help her, including a diverse cast of fishermen, farmers, grandmothers and graduate students. The local media got wind of the project and two different Honolulu-based news teams filmed the event and interviewed Jackie. Projects like Jackie’s are common around the waters of Moku O Lo‘e, or Coconut Island, as it’s colloquially known. Moku O Lo‘e is home to the Hawai‘i Institute of Marine Biology (HIMB), where a cadre of marine scientists are breaking new ground in applying innovative marine science to current conservation challenges. The marine laboratories, however, are a relatively recent addition to Moku O Lo‘e. The island has a rich 44
GRE E N M A G A Z I N E H AWAII.C O M
history, which has been chronicled by P. Christiaan Klieger in a fantastic book, Moku O Lo‘e: A History of Coconut Island, published by the Bishop Museum Press in 2007. Moku O Lo‘e is a small remnant of O‘ahu’s distant volcanic past and was traditionally part of the extensive Ko‘olau district that encompassed most of O‘ahu’s windward side. Traditional legends tie the island’s name to a story of banished siblings, one of which was named Lo‘e, but the literal translation of lo‘e as a the “curve of a fishhook” also refers the island’s historical association with fishing. Moku O Lo‘e originally belonged to Hawaiian royalty, including Kamehameha I and Bernice Pauahi Bishop. In early times, the abundant fishing grounds surrounding Moku O Lo‘e provided a significant resource that was integrated into the diversified subsistence base that encompassed the expansive kalo lo‘i and fishponds (loko i‘a) of the Ko‘olau district. Tales abound of hundred pound octopus and large sharks, which haunted the reefs around the island. As land tenure in Hawai‘i changed, so did the fate of little Moku O Lo‘e. In the 1930s the Bishop Estate sold the island to Christian Holmes II, the heir to the substantial fortune of the Fleischmann yeast company. Holmes’s vision for the island differed significantly from