This is from today's Times....
Waikiki Beach's Unloved Backwater Spawns a Record-Setting Crustacean
March 3, 2003
By LAWRENCE DOWNES
HONOLULU, March 2 - Murderous, google-eyed crustaceans with
barbed spears and razor-switchblade appendages that can
shred fish and flesh to ribbons have been captured in the
shallow waters off Waikiki. Big ones. Salami-sized. The
biggest ever recorded in Hawaii.
Panic, however, has not set in.
That is because these
creatures, burrowing predators called mantis shrimp, have
turned up not on Waikiki Beach, the stretch of white sand
and blue-green surf that remains as dreamy and safe as
ever, but in the Ala Wai Canal, a smelly, silty drainage
basin behind Waikiki that tourists shun and many locals
deride as one step up from a sewer.
The news that the jumbo stomatopods (not shrimp,
technically) were thriving in waters that regularly give
canoe paddlers infections and parasitic rashes caused much
wonderment when it was reported recently in The Honolulu
Advertiser.
People here think of the Ala Wai (pronounced Allah-why),
when they think of it at all, mainly as a habitat for old
tires, rusty shopping carts and schools of indestructible
tilapia.
The shrimp were good news, too, for Keith Harvey, a member
of a dredging crew that dug up the five specimens of the
stomatopod, Lysiosquillina maculata, while working to clear
the canal of two decades' worth of silt and trash. Mr.
Harvey dared to nab the biggest one, a 15-inch, 1.35-pound
monster, using a stick and a gloved hand as it flopped in
the muck on the crew's barge.
"I saw this one, I was all smiles," recalled Mr. Harvey,
43, who kept it in a cooler while his boss, Dan Mahnke,
contacted The Hawaii Fishing News, which later issued a
certificate confirming Mr. Harvey's shrimp as the state
record-holder.
The dredging is a state-financed, $7.4 million effort to
restore a measure of health and self-respect to the Ala
Wai, which began filling with sediment almost as soon as
the Army Corps of Engineers dug it in 1927 to control
floods and mosquitoes and to provide landfill for the
swampland that was then Waikiki. The canal, which collects
runoff from streams and storm drains on the densely
populated mountain slopes above Waikiki, has been dredged
periodically, most recently in 1979.
With little ocean circulation to flush it clean, the
1.3-mile-long canal has essentially become a liquid compost
pile, teeming with marine life and bacteria, but stinky,
and unloved by people who walk next to or paddle in it.
Some heavily silted stretches are barely a foot deep or
exposed at low tide.
"It's either working really well or not at all," said Dr.
Eric H. De Carlo, a professor of oceanography at the
University of Hawaii. "The Ala Wai is one of the world's
most productive estuaries in terms of carbon production,"
Professor De Carlo said, thanks to runoff nutrients, but it
also contains contaminants like pesticides, detergents and
lead.
Karen Ah Mai, executive director of the Ala Wai Watershed
Association, a nonprofit group, said the Ala Wai has the
most densely populated watershed in the United States. It
is home to 150,000 people, all living in a compact zone
between mountains and sea that has long since lost its
natural flood-control and water-filtration system, the
marshes now occupied by the concrete jungle of Waikiki. The
dredging should improve things, she said, but the only
lasting solution depends on reducing contaminants from the
streets, sidewalks and culverts that drain down to the
canal.
The canal's years of neglect gave the dredged-up shrimp
time to grow about as big as the species ever gets. Dr. Roy
L. Caldwell, a professor of integrative biology at the
University of California at Berkeley and a leading
authority on mantis shrimp, said that judging from the size
of Mr. Harvey's specimens, they had probably been in the
Ala Wai for 20 years. Ferocious as they are, mantis shrimp
are homebodies and mate for life, said Professor Caldwell,
who has studied the same pair in a burrow in Kaneohe Bay,
on Oahu, for 25 years.
Not knowing what he had, Mr. Mahnke said, he let the first
shrimp go. He tried to give the others to aquariums, but
"nobody wanted a thing to do with them," he said.
Mr. Harvey took the big one home. "I was planning on
raising him," he said. He kept it in a cooler for a few
days, changing the water regularly. "Then I thought about
the aquarium not wanting him," he said, and so he boiled
the mantis shrimp, a delicacy throughout the South Pacific,
and ate it.
"It was really sweet," Mr. Harvey said, even without
butter.
Mr. Mahnke cut in: "I told him all you need is New York
steak to make a good meal. He looked at that big one, shook
his head, and said, `I no need steak.' "
Waikiki Beach's Unloved Backwater Spawns a Record-Setting Crustacean
March 3, 2003
By LAWRENCE DOWNES
HONOLULU, March 2 - Murderous, google-eyed crustaceans with
barbed spears and razor-switchblade appendages that can
shred fish and flesh to ribbons have been captured in the
shallow waters off Waikiki. Big ones. Salami-sized. The
biggest ever recorded in Hawaii.
Panic, however, has not set in.
That is because these
creatures, burrowing predators called mantis shrimp, have
turned up not on Waikiki Beach, the stretch of white sand
and blue-green surf that remains as dreamy and safe as
ever, but in the Ala Wai Canal, a smelly, silty drainage
basin behind Waikiki that tourists shun and many locals
deride as one step up from a sewer.
The news that the jumbo stomatopods (not shrimp,
technically) were thriving in waters that regularly give
canoe paddlers infections and parasitic rashes caused much
wonderment when it was reported recently in The Honolulu
Advertiser.
People here think of the Ala Wai (pronounced Allah-why),
when they think of it at all, mainly as a habitat for old
tires, rusty shopping carts and schools of indestructible
tilapia.
The shrimp were good news, too, for Keith Harvey, a member
of a dredging crew that dug up the five specimens of the
stomatopod, Lysiosquillina maculata, while working to clear
the canal of two decades' worth of silt and trash. Mr.
Harvey dared to nab the biggest one, a 15-inch, 1.35-pound
monster, using a stick and a gloved hand as it flopped in
the muck on the crew's barge.
"I saw this one, I was all smiles," recalled Mr. Harvey,
43, who kept it in a cooler while his boss, Dan Mahnke,
contacted The Hawaii Fishing News, which later issued a
certificate confirming Mr. Harvey's shrimp as the state
record-holder.
The dredging is a state-financed, $7.4 million effort to
restore a measure of health and self-respect to the Ala
Wai, which began filling with sediment almost as soon as
the Army Corps of Engineers dug it in 1927 to control
floods and mosquitoes and to provide landfill for the
swampland that was then Waikiki. The canal, which collects
runoff from streams and storm drains on the densely
populated mountain slopes above Waikiki, has been dredged
periodically, most recently in 1979.
With little ocean circulation to flush it clean, the
1.3-mile-long canal has essentially become a liquid compost
pile, teeming with marine life and bacteria, but stinky,
and unloved by people who walk next to or paddle in it.
Some heavily silted stretches are barely a foot deep or
exposed at low tide.
"It's either working really well or not at all," said Dr.
Eric H. De Carlo, a professor of oceanography at the
University of Hawaii. "The Ala Wai is one of the world's
most productive estuaries in terms of carbon production,"
Professor De Carlo said, thanks to runoff nutrients, but it
also contains contaminants like pesticides, detergents and
lead.
Karen Ah Mai, executive director of the Ala Wai Watershed
Association, a nonprofit group, said the Ala Wai has the
most densely populated watershed in the United States. It
is home to 150,000 people, all living in a compact zone
between mountains and sea that has long since lost its
natural flood-control and water-filtration system, the
marshes now occupied by the concrete jungle of Waikiki. The
dredging should improve things, she said, but the only
lasting solution depends on reducing contaminants from the
streets, sidewalks and culverts that drain down to the
canal.
The canal's years of neglect gave the dredged-up shrimp
time to grow about as big as the species ever gets. Dr. Roy
L. Caldwell, a professor of integrative biology at the
University of California at Berkeley and a leading
authority on mantis shrimp, said that judging from the size
of Mr. Harvey's specimens, they had probably been in the
Ala Wai for 20 years. Ferocious as they are, mantis shrimp
are homebodies and mate for life, said Professor Caldwell,
who has studied the same pair in a burrow in Kaneohe Bay,
on Oahu, for 25 years.
Not knowing what he had, Mr. Mahnke said, he let the first
shrimp go. He tried to give the others to aquariums, but
"nobody wanted a thing to do with them," he said.
Mr. Harvey took the big one home. "I was planning on
raising him," he said. He kept it in a cooler for a few
days, changing the water regularly. "Then I thought about
the aquarium not wanting him," he said, and so he boiled
the mantis shrimp, a delicacy throughout the South Pacific,
and ate it.
"It was really sweet," Mr. Harvey said, even without
butter.
Mr. Mahnke cut in: "I told him all you need is New York
steak to make a good meal. He looked at that big one, shook
his head, and said, `I no need steak.' "
