Meet the scientist
Senior scientist and cultural advisor at The Nature Conservancy, Hawai‘i
Conservation biologist Samuel Ohu Gon III on the future of Hawaiian wildlife
In 2014, Samuel Ohu Gon III was titled ‘Living Treasure of Hawai‘i’ for his work integrating cultural values with wildlife conservation, and he has a vision of hope for the future.
J ust a few years ago, Sam Ohu Gon III, and other members of the Hawai‘i Conservation Alliance, drew up a timeline of the major milestones in the islands’ conservation history. There were extinctions (quite a few, sadly), as well as the creation of national parks. Then, they extended it into the future.
“For 2037, I wrote: ‘ The first genetically resurrected ‘o‘o [endemic honeyeater] is reintroduced into a mosquito-free forest on Hawai‘i’,” Gon says.
Before Europeans arrived in Hawai‘i, there were different species of ‘o‘os on four of the islands, but they slowly disappeared – victims of habitat loss and the arrival of mosquitoes and malaria in 1826 – until just the one on Kaua‘i Island was left.
“Then, in 1982, a hurricane went right through the island and, by that time, there were so few birds [that] most ornithologists knew where to go to hear or see a particular individual,” Gon recalls. After that, ‘o‘os were virtually never heard again – an entire genus, gone with the wind.
Gon, indeed, has seen and heard five species of bird that have subsequently gone extinct, so it would be understandable if his outlook tended towards despair. But there’s not a hint of that, even when discussing the ‘ohi‘a, the dominant tree species of the islands’ forests, which is valued for its hardwood and the bright red f lowers that are woven into the traditional garlands known as ‘leis’.
In 2014, a fungal pathogen that kills at least 90 per cent of all ‘ohi‘as was detected in Hawai‘i and, in just four years, it has destroyed more than 50,000ha of forest – hence the disease being named Rapid ‘Ohi‘a Death (ROD).
As a scientist, Gon’s specialism is bio- cultural conservation, which is concerned with those plants and animals that have significance for people – plants like the ‘ohi‘a, in fact. So, his role in the ROD working group is to communicate with those islanders who traditionally use the tree for its wood or f lowers, in order to ensure that they don’t inadvertently spread the disease to new areas.
One native species that it would be impossible to be sad about is the Hawaiian happy-face spider. For his PhD, Gon took females from one island to another to see how they reacted when the males performed their courtship dance. “The females rejected the males,” he says. “In fact, they attacked them.”
Gon had discovered that, over tens of thousands and possibly even millions of years, happy-face spiders on different islands, and even different regions of one island, have become reproductively isolated purely because of this behaviour.
In general, the spiders thankfully reproduce without difficulty. The same cannot be said of the ‘o‘o, but with scientists working on how to eradicate the mosquitos, and on how to use its DNA to bring it back to life, perhaps Gon’s dream of hearing them sing once again will come true.
S Gon has seen and heard five species of bird that have now gone extinct. T