Ambon tobies are little pufferfishes that are usually found fairly close to shore. This colorful little fish is liberally covered with blue spots and lines.
Ambon toby
Author Archives: Graham
Everyone needs a copy editor
On Saturday, I was finalizing my post for Sunday when I had a copy editor drop in. This baby gecko checked out my typing and seemed satisfied. Then it padded up the screen to the top, perched there for a while, before disappearing down the back.
I usually use my laptop while sitting next to a window in the living room. It’s a long-standing tradition in this house for baby geckos to peer over the edge of the trim above this window, before leaping down onto my head, legs, or computer. This is a drop of five or six feet, which is 60 to 70 times the length of these little geckos. That would be like me throwing myself off a 400-foot-high cliff. The only difference is that I wouldn’t be getting up and going anywhere after that.
Sidewalks these days
This week’s Sunday Stills challenge theme is ‘City Sidewalks.’ See more responses here. The Big Island is a bit short on cities, but we do have a few sidewalks, even up here in North Kohala.
For many years, Hawi had a Saturday farmers’ market, which was held on a green space, under the banyan trees, near the heart of the community. The Covid virus shut that down and after a while, it was announced that the market wouldn’t return. Instead, once restrictions were eased, a Saturday morning market appeared on the sidewalks downtown. This wasn’t a problem since pretty much all the businesses were closed.
Yesterday’s market was quite busy, with the added boost of the approaching Christmas season. In the top photo, the Kohala Coffee Mill was open for business but still had room for a couple of vendors out front. In the second photo, the space in front of the Bamboo Restaurant is fully occupied. The restaurant has been closed since March, and while limited seating and take out is allowed now, the restaurant has not reopened. A lot of their trade was from tourists so I suspect they’re waiting to see how that develops. They do, however, appear to be planning on reopening.
The third photo, taken farther down the street, was taken a few days earlier and reflects how things are without an event like the market. This building, at street level, was occupied by a gallery and a popular restaurant. Both have not only closed, but aren’t going to reopen. The spaces appear to be in the process of gaining new tenants, though I doubt they’ll open soon since there are still relatively few tourists visiting the island, at least compared to previous years.
The bottom photo shows a covered sidewalk, which complements the street sidewalk. There are several active businesses in this building, but it’s still much quieter than it used to be. I suspect that this year might have reminded old timers of how this part of the island used to be in the days before the tourist boom happened.
The bottom photo is also posted in response to Bushboy’s Last on the Card photo challenge for November. See more responses here.
Poinsettia
This week’s Friendly Friday challenge theme is ‘Red and Green.’ See more responses here.
Poinsettias (Euphorbia pulcherrima) have been associated with Christmas for centuries in Mexico and Central America, where the plant hails from. The plant was introduced to the United States in the 1800s, but it wasn’t until the last century that the Christmas link really took off. This was mostly due to savvy marketing tactics by the Ecke family, which had a monopoly on the poinsettia market thanks to their discovery of a secret grafting method which produced a denser plant and wasn’t duplicated until the 1990s.
The red ‘flowers’ are actually bracts, which hold the fairly insignificant flowers. On the Big Island, their brilliant displays are quite common on the west side of the island, where they can be seen as bushes and trees.
Better Days: Old Coast Guard Station
The Old Coast Guard Station near Upolu was constructed in 1944 as a Loran station. Loran was an early navigation positioning system. The original system was Loran A, but this was replaced by Loran C in the early 1960s.
Over the years there were changes to the buildings, staffing, and equipment at the station until, in 1993, the station closed. For many years not much happened. The buildings began a steady decline. The station had been built on two different land parcels and, upon closure, these ended up in the hands of the Hawaiian Homelands and Parker Ranch.
When I first moved to Hawaii, a local policeman used to live in one of the buildings. It was all fairly low key and mellow. When the policeman moved out, Parker Ranch put up no trespassing signs and had security personnel driving by to check the area. They stopped people from walking along the coastline for exercise or to fish because, God forbid that unauthorized people should set foot on any of the thousands of acres they own. (Yes, I was bitter about that attitude.)
Eventually, Parker Ranch sold their slice of the old station and the new owners refurbished the two buildings on that property (the blue buildings in the top photo). Regular people can now walk the coastline again as the very nice owners marked a path with coconut shells.
The rest of the station continues to slowly decay. Owned by Hawaiian Homelands, the chances of anything happening in my lifetime are remote.
For more information about the history of the Old Coast Guard Loran Station near Upolu, go to http://www.loran-history.info/upolu_point/upolu_point.htm. Scroll down to Documents and find the General Information Books for 1969, 1978, and 1988 for some interesting historical information about the station and the area.
Golden pool at Keawaiki
The golden pools at Keawaiki, on the North Kona Coast, get their color from a unique algae that lives in the pools. The pools are actually a little way inland from Pueo Bay, just north of Keawaiki Bay. If you visit, please refrain from taking a dip in the pools so that you don’t disturb or destroy the delicate ecosystem there.
Still a few bugs in the system
Passion vine butterflies lay eggs on passion vine leaves because that’s what the caterpillar is going to eat. Mostly, a butterfly will lay one egg per leaf so some passion vines have developed yellow spots to try and convince butterflies that the leaves are already egg laden. I haven’t seen this strategy working too well.
Once a caterpillar emerges it will begin a life of voraciously eating passion vine leaves. There’s an early video game quality about this as the mouth chomps back and forth across the leaves, cutting one arc after another.
However, despite the presence of caterpillars, butterflies continue to lay eggs on the leaves. So what happens when a caterpillar comes across an egg? It makes no distinction and down goes the egg. So long cousin Billy!
Chained salp
Yesterday, when I was out snorkeling, I was spotted this entity hanging in the water. When I first saw it, I thought it might be a pyrosoma. I was lucky enough to see one of those last year, which I posted about here. Pyrosoma are colonies of many individual tunicates and this new sighting looked somewhat similar. But where that pyrosoma looked like a gelatinous tube with little purple dots in it, this tube was longer, thinner, and had much larger, and clearly visible, brown spots in it.
After some research, I’m pretty sure this is a chained salp. Like pyrosoma, chained salps are colonies of individuals. The individuals have a heart, gills and a spinal cord, which makes them quite advanced in evolutionary terms. They move around by pumping water through their bodies. When they form chains, the individuals in the chains communicate with electrical signals so the the chain moves in harmony.
Typically, salps are creatures of the open ocean, and not often seen in Hawaii, so I feel quite fortunate to have seen this one.
Graham's Island 