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Monthly walks State entomologist Pat Conant has been leading the charge against the spread of the miconia plant on Oahu with an army of volunteers.
fight miconia
The plant's thick leaves shade
out other species and
take over spaceBy Pat Gee
Star-BulletinHe has done much of the work on his own time because he doesn't want Hawaii to suffer the same fate as Tahiti, which is overrun with the invasive plant.
Besides, he said, "no one else was doing it."
About once a month, the Department of Agriculture scientist leads as many as 20 volunteers -- most from the Sierra Club and government and nonprofit agencies -- into the jungles on a search-and-destroy mission.
To help stamp out miconia, call the Nature Conservancy at 677-1674. The next hunt is Oct. 28. TO HELP
The threat isn't obvious at first. Miconia has no thorns or poison berries. The swift-growing plant's giant purple-and-green leaves simply shade out other species -- and take over. And its shallow roots are easily washed away by rains, contributing to erosion.
"Each one of them is capable of putting out millions of seeds in a year," said Nelson Ho, a Big Island leader in miconia eradication. A seed is viable for eight years, and although smaller than a grain of sand, it can produce a tree up to 50 feet tall.
'Most noxious tree'
"Miconia is the state's most noxious tree," Ho said. "It's so prolific. The trees create a canopy, so very little light can come through."It literally smothers everything below it."
Sometimes the miconia warriors discover the "enemy" where they didn't expect it. Conant found a big patch on 1 acres near Paradise Park and the Lyon Arboretum three months ago.
There are regular aerial sweeps of the area to track the plant, and "I thought we were doing fairly well until we found the large patch in Manoa," Conant said. Manoa is where the South American ornamental was planted in the 1970s before it was identified as an invasive species.
Joan Yoshioka, chairman of the just-formed Oahu Invasive Species Committee, is another soldier on the warpath. She said 500 plants, including 100 tree-sized ones, were removed from Manoa -- "more than we've ever found before."
Yoshioka said most seedlings are pulled by hand, but larger trees are cut off at the base. A herbicide is applied to the stump, then it is hauled away.
Even more recently, a small patch was found in July in Waimanalo. In the past, miconia has been detected in Kalihi, the Old Pali Road and Tantalus.
It's already too late to eradicate miconia on the Big Island and Maui, but efforts can at least keep it from spreading.
In the past three years, 299,000 plants have been killed on the Big Island, Ho said. About 36,200 were mature, seed-spreading plants.
Ho said the "worst fear" of Big Island growers is that products that may be contaminated by miconia seed could be quarantined so that they could not be sent off-island for sale.
Methodical eradication
Jordan Jokiel, a volunteer with the Oahu Fountain Grass Working Group and an employee of the Army's environmental division, said he and other volunteers "feel it's really important ... and it's a lot of fun.He said the miconia-killers sweep several acres of "super-ugly, thick" vegetation as methodically as an army reconnaissance team, walking up the gulches and slopes looking for the distinctive oval-shaped leaves with purple undersides.
In addition to the monthly walks, Conant heads the agriculture department's research on controlling miconia with a fungus and insects.
Fred Kraus, alien species coordinator with the state Department of Land and Natural Resources, said $500,000 was allocated for miconia eradication in the past legislative session. The funds will be used mainly for crews on the Big Island and Maui, biological control research and helicopter surveillance, he said.
Yoshioka remains "cautiously optimistic we can remove it totally from Oahu."
Conant adds, "Quitting is not an option."