Northwestern Hawaiian isle
center opens in HiloThe federally funded facility
displays the beauty of the chain
HILO >> Around the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, stretching hundreds of miles past Niihau, 60 percent of the ocean creatures are top predators, said Robert Smith, manager of the federal Coral Reef Ecosystem in those islands.
"When you scuba there, you are definitely a visitor. It is an ocean on steroids," he said.
In comparison, the predators around the main Hawaiian Islands make up only 3 percent of the sea life, he said.
The two numbers show the enormous richness around the northwestern islands and the relative poverty of sea life around the main islands.
Yesterday, Smith and others opened a federally funded, $1.3 million education and exhibition center in downtown Hilo devoted to revealing the beauty of the 1,200-mile-long chain of rocks, reefs and sand barely sticking out of the sea where few people will ever go.
Called Moku Papapa, the Hawaiian term for a low reef island, the discovery center is a place where everyone from tourists to schoolchildren can see the reef islands as they are and envision the main islands as they once were and could again become.
Located in the restored S. Hata Building on Kamehameha Avenue, Hilo's "front street," the facility will not only educate, but also boost the economy with a $370,000 annual operating budget supplied through the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Far from the northwestern islands, Hilo got the facility because Maui and Oahu already have ocean centers, Kauai was not ready for it and the University of Hawaii at Hilo was a ready partner in making the project happen, Smith said.
Visitors marveled at exhibits like ulua seemingly bursting out of the wall, hooked by lines from a double-hulled canoe.
But several speakers spoke of an underlying sadness that the new center may change to hope.
Hawaiian navigator Nainoa Thompson remembered the time when he was a 4-year-old boy growing up on an Oahu dairy farm, going down to the seashore with an old man named Yoshi Kawano.
"I would say how beautiful the ocean is," Thompson said. But Kawano would reply, "You should have seen it when I was a kid."
"I know we're going the wrong way," Thompson said. "I constantly watch the decline of our natural resources." The decline produces in him a "quiet rage," he said.
But, Thompson added about the new center, "This place gives a sense of hope."
Mayor Harry Kim echoed Thompson's sentiments. Kim pointed to a painting on the center's wall of a mass of lauwiliwili, brilliant yellow fish called milletseed butterfly fish in English.
"We used to see hundreds of these," Kim said. "Now if you see one or two, you're lucky." That decline has happened just in the past 10 years, he said.
He goes to his shoreline home in Kapoho and sees people killing sea cucumbers, "just killing to kill, to kill, which you can never understand," he said.
"What you are doing here gives us hope," he told center officials.
The mass of sea life in the northwestern islands is a hundred to a thousand times greater than around the main islands, said University of Hawaii oceanographer Richard Grigg.
"That could exist here again," he said.