From poke to takoyaki, people in Hawaiʻi love to eat octopus. With octopus being overfished internationally, Hawaiʻi will need to find a way to continue to keep the local octopus population thriving.
Savannah Harriman-Pote rejoined The Conversation in 2021 after interning for Hawaiʻi Public Radio in the summers of 2018 and 2019. She also produces HPR's podcast Manu Minute in collaboration with The University of Hawaii at Hilo. She was born and raised on the Big Island, and she collects public radio mugs.
Kauai Community Science Center
Citizen science even if you re unfamiliar with the term, you probably have a good guess as to what it means. Some people call it. people-powered discovery, said Ellen McCallie, a program director with the National Science Foundation. Citizen science is a way that people, whether you re a trained scientist or not, can contribute to our understanding of the world. It s a way that you can volunteer your time, your energy, your expertise, to provide insight to science.
The NSF funds competitive citizen science proposals from across the country. But if you re just looking to dip your toes in, McCallie recommends the website SciStarter. It aggregates both local and global volunteer-based projects.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has proposed downlisting the Hawaiian stilt, or
ae’o, from endangered to threatened under the Endangered Species Act. It would be the third Hawaiian bird to be reclassified in the past few years after the nene in 2019 and the Hawaiian hawk in 2020. Over the past three decades, a strong network of conservation actions throughout Hawaiʻi has resulted in more wetland areas being managed compatible with the species’ needs. The State of Hawaiʻi has been a key partner, along with efforts on National Wildlife Refuges, to protect, manage, and conserve the significant wetland habitats and supporting aeʻo populations over the last 30 years, the federal agency said.
Hawaiʻi Institute of Marine Biology
Local marine biologists say Hawaiian blue rice coral may reveal important clues as to how some corals might weather climate change. New research from the Hawai‘i Institute of Marine Biology and the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute takes a closer look at this phenomenon and the findings are good news.
The Conversation’s Savannah Harriman-Pote spoke with post-doctoral researcher Mike Henley about the new discovery.
The Hawai‘i Institute of Marine Biology is part of the School of Ocean & Earth Science & Technology at the University of Hawai i at Manoa. This segment aired on The Conversation on June 25, 2021.