When I went out to see the last lunar eclipse, I noticed these lights bobbing in the ocean just off the coast. My guess is that they belonged to people spear fishing, or possibly in kayaks or a small boat. Regardless, I liked the abstract patterns the lights made.
Three of the Big Island’s volcanoes – from left, Mauna Kea, Mauna Loa, and Hualalai – seen as daylight suffuses the sky.
Posted in response to this week’s Sunday Stills challenge on the theme of ‘Daylight.’ See more offerings here.
This week’s Friendly Friday challenge theme is ‘Climate Change.’ (See more responses here.) Living on an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean makes climate change a relevant topic. Our weather is affected, our wildlife is impacted, our food supplies could be disrupted. But I’ve chosen to picture something obvious and current – humpback whales.
I posted (here) about the decline in the number of humpbacks coming to Hawaii to breed and calve, an estimated drop of 50- to 80-percent over the last four years. I expect that decline to extend to this year’s numbers.
I’ve lived here for seven whale seasons and the drop in numbers from the first couple of years to now is visible and obvious. January through March are supposed to be the height of whale season, but the number of whales here is dropping. I spend a lot of time in the island’s prime whale viewing area and already they are few and far between.
Each year, NOAA conducts a whale count on the last Saturday of January, February, and March. Last year, at the count site I attended, we saw no whales in March – none. This was unprecedented. I wouldn’t be surprised if this month’s count repeats that result and I certainly don’t expect them to see more than two or three whales.
A conference in Honolulu last fall attributed the drop in the number of whales visiting Hawaii to warmer waters in Alaska affecting the whales’ food supply. Those waters are warming because of climate change. So what will happen? Well, my belief is that people make money off activities that cause climate change and the best/only way to change that is to make those activities less profitable or to make it more profitable to be engaged in activities that combat climate change. An alternative is to have people become less geared to making obscene amounts of money, but that, I think, is wishful thinking indeed.
In these photos, a humpback whale slaps its tail, one of several common humpback activities that are monitored during the NOAA whale counts.
Mackerel scad are schooling fish, the kind that make ‘bait balls’ which end up being decimated by large predators. They’re members of the jack family, not that this does them much good. Some of those large predators are other members of the jack family such as greater amberjacks and almaco jacks.
I came across this school not far from shore. There were probably two or three hundred fish in the school and it was fun watching them twirl and circle in harmony. They encircled me, went past and I popped out the other side. It was then I noticed they weren’t alone. One the other side of the school, a medium-sized great barracuda cruised around.
The barracuda came toward me to take a look, but I was clearly less interesting than the scad and it moved away again. The barracuda can be seen in the bottom photo. See if you can spot it.
I’ve posted about my January visit to Pohoiki here, here, and here. The reason I was able to make that visit is because the county finally put a temporary road over one of the flows that cut off that part of the island.
One of the features of lava flows is that they don’t uniformly erase everything in their path. Sometimes they flow around areas. Sometimes they stop and a new flow emerges to one side. Sometimes a flow blocks one side of an area and a different flow blocks the other side.
The 2018 Kilauea eruption was no different in this regard. Some houses escaped destruction, but became inaccessible by road. Pohoiki was one of those places, until the new road was completed.
Things move at a leisurely pace in Hawaii and one might think the delay in building the road was due to this, but in this case, the county had good reason to wait. The simple reason is that they had to wait for the lava to cool down. It took several months for the lava to cool enough to make it practical to build a road over the flow. Even then it would not have been safe to cut through the flow and build the road at its former level.
How quickly the lava cools depends on many things including hot hot it was to begin with and how deep the flow is. It can take many months before the lava at the heart of a flow cools down enough to solidify and not present a danger.
For those interested in what happened during that 2018 eruption, the PBS show, NOVA, broadcast an episode titled ‘Kīlauea: Hawaiʻi on Fire.’ It’s about 50 minutes long and has a bit of a dramatic ‘will anyone survive’ tone in places, but I found it very informative. It might be available at https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/, but if not you can see it here.
This is Sunshine, once a feral cat, now somewhat domesticated. Her right ear has been clipped to show she’s been spayed. She’s also been chipped and had her shots. And while she can be affectionate, especially when she’d like to be fed, she’s not above slashing wrists if she feels like it. A cat to handle with care, perhaps.
There are a lot of bougainvillea blooming currently, creating swathes of color where they’re planted as hedges or borders. I’ve been surprised by the scarcity of bees and other pollinators around the new flowers. Perhaps this is just a factor of the area where I see most of these flowers.
Squaretail filefish are easily identified by the white patch at the base of the tail and the orange fins.
