Feeding Behavior of Great White

This essay will take a particular case study, Hawaii Volcanoes National Park and attempt to provide a brief background on its history and forces of creation. The park impacts on human and non-human species alike will also be discussed. The latter part of this essay will focus on a few challenges the park faces in the future.

History/Forces of Creation/Goals

Hawaii Volcanoes National Park was created on 1 August 1916 by President Woodrow Wilson making it America's 13th national park. Lorrin Thurston, publisher of the Honolulu Pacific Commercial Advertiser and Dr. Thomas A. Jaggar promoted the idea of making the volcanoes into a national park. Thurston who loved to explore the volcanic lands discovered a giant lava tube that can still be seen today; it is rightly called the Thurston Lava Tube. Dr. Jaggar came to the islands to establish and serve as director of the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory. Together they lobbied politicians, wrote editorials, and promoted their idea for a national park (Hamilton).

Visitors also played a vital force in its creation. In the early 1900s many visitors to the area began to suggest that the volcanic wonders should be protected in the same way as those in Yellowstone country (Park History-NPS webpage).

The park encompasses the summits and rift zones of two of the world's most active volcanoes, Kilauea and Mauna Loa. Besides an obvious haven for calderas, pit craters, black sand beaches, and fumaroles the park is home to many interesting creatures including carnivorous caterpillars, honey creepers, and a refuge for many endangered species such as the hawksbill turtle and dark-rumped petrel. In recognition of its outstanding values the park has been designated as an International Biosphere Reserve (1980) and a World Heritage Site (1987).

The parks purpose found on the National Park Service's webpage states that "the mission of the park is to preserve for the enjoyment, education, and inspiration of this and future generations, the significant resources that reflect Hawaii's geological, biological, and cultural heritage. These resources demonstrate the powerful and awe-inspiring volcanic forces that create new land and the unique adaptations of plants, animals, and people to that land" (Hawaii Volcanoes Webpage).

Some goals of the park are as follows (6): 1. Remove any alien invasive species with primary focus on highly disruptive weeds and introduced ungulates such as sheep, goats, and pigs. 2. Restore highly altered park ecosystems to conditions as natural as practical through extensive plantings of seedlings. 3. Restore lost biodiversity in park ecosystems by recovering endangered, threatened, and rare species and reintroducing locally "extirpated" species. 4. Develop a systematic, science- based program of inventory and monitoring to better understand ecosystem populations, communities, threats, stresses, and health. 5. Maintain and expand park partnerships with neighbors for natural and cultural resource protection to target invasive species that are threatening parklands. And 6. Focus on the recovery of four endangered species: the nene, Hawaiian petrel, hawksbill turtle, and Mauna Loa silversword (NPS webpage-Nature section).

Park impacts on human and non-human species

The park is rich in remains of its history and particularly so along the coast where native villages are located which are laden with graves, paved trails, canoe landings, petroglyphs, shelter caves, agricultural areas, and many things the indigenous peoples hold culturally sacred (IUCN-The World Conservation Union).

After the arrival of the British explorer James Cook in 1778-79, Christian influences started in or around 1823 with churches and schools built and the introduction of cattle, goat, and pulu (tree-fern product) harvesting (IUCN-The World Conservation Union). In essence "the park perpetuates the island's native Hawaiian culture and protects numerous significant archeological sites--tangible reminders of an indigenous people forever linked to this land" (Hawaii Volcanoes Webpage).

The park is also rich in Hawaiian tradition and legend. The Hawaiians have beautiful legends to tell of the creation and maintenance of this pristine land. Pele the volcano goddess is said to have settled in the crater of Halema'uma'u at the summit of Kilauea and is a representative of volcanism in all its forms. She along with 'io the sacred ancestral spirit hawk, mano the shark who appeared when a canoe capsized and escorted the men to shore on its back, as well as many others remind us of an omnipresent folklore and tradition that is deeply embedded in the park (History & Culture-Legends NPS webpage).

A significant portion of the park's flora is threatened by ungulates, introduced plants, and wildfire. The 19 nationally endangered or threatened plant species and candidate species comprise 10% of the vascular plant flora of the park (IUCN-The World Conservation Union). Plants that have survived for millennia now face tremendous threats from alien invasive species, creating great challenges for resource managers (NPS webpage-Plants). Yet for those with the right survival strategy this remote volcanic island became a kind of evolutionary frontier for species who exploited new opportunities to find food and homes beginning about 70 million years ago (NPS webpage-Animals). Contact with the outside world has disrupted the isolation that allowed for the evolution of native island species. And although protected within this park, animals that have survived for millennia now face monumental threats from habitat loss, bird malaria, invasions of alien invasive species (as stated earlier), rats, cats, feral goats, pigs, and mouflon sheep (NPS webpage-Animals).

Future challenges

The control of feral pigs and non-native plants are the highest conservation management priorities (IUCN-The World Conservation Union).

This last section will be divided into two parts, the first pertaining to the control of animals (goats, rabbits, pigs), and the second pertaining to mostly the control of non-native (exotic) species.

Goats were introduced to the Hawaiian Islands nearly 200 years ago and today roam in many Hawaiian ecosystems with dry-season climates ranging from the lowlands to the mountains (Spatz & Dombois). A quantitative analysis was made to evaluate the influence of feral goats on tree reproduction of Acacia koa variation hawaiiensis (Spatz & Dombois). The goat damage consists of killing the saplings from stem breakage. When the goat damage became evident the Park Service had to step up its goat control program. The