 This is Think Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. It's one o'clock on a Monday afternoon, so you must be watching Think Tech Hawaii research in Manoa. I'm your host, Pete McGinnis-Mark, and my guest today is Dr. Rosie Alagardo, who is an assistant professor in the Department of Oceanography at UH Manoa. So welcome, Rosie. I understand we're going to be talking about fish ponds in Hawaii today, a topic I know virtually nothing about, so it's all going to be up to you to explain to our viewers why we're interested in fish ponds, the cultural significance, and how it might actually be helpful to Hawaii moving into the future. So can you just give us a brief overview? What are fish ponds, where they found? Sure. So first of all, mahalo, for having me on the program. It's great to be able to share my work. I do most of my field work at a fish pond called Heia Fish Pond on the windward side of the island. The stewards of that fish pond are Paipai Ohia, they're my community partners on Oahu, yes. And so your first question is, what are fish ponds? So fish ponds are Hawai'i's innovative way of doing aquaculture, coastal aquaculture, and so there's four different kinds, but the one that we think of as a fish pond that's really unique to Hawai'i is a walled fish pond that has sluice gates or openings that allow exchange of fresh water and salt water to mix. And inside the fish pond, they're always built at the end of a stream, so the confluence of the stream and the ocean. So you have a lot of brackish water, that brackish water has a lot of nutrients, which stimulates the growth of algae or limu, and that's what herbivores like to eat. And these are not a new innovation in the way culturally they've been in Hawai'i for centuries. So the fish pond that I work at, Heia Fish Pond, the coral heads are dated to be at least 800 years old, so this is a very old practice that was developed during a time of famine. And so, for example, now on the North Shore, it's very, very rough. And so if you were a fisherman, you couldn't go out and catch fish for your family. But if you have these coastal fish ponds, you have constant access to protein. And so these were really innovations that supported sustainable practices and large populations. Right. And presumably this might be a solution to some of the homegrown food in Hawai'i even today. Exactly. So this is a growing movement. The organization is called Hui Malama Loko'i'a, and it's made up of communities across the island chain who are trying to restore their fish ponds and bring back and increase food production. And you brought along a list in the first slide, I think, you've got a list of some of the important aspects. What can we learn from Hawaiian fish ponds? So just walk us through here, we've got four main bullets. So first of all, because fish ponds are at the bottom of our ahupua'a or our watershed, they're really a good baseline for us to kind of take the temperature on how the land has changed because it all ends up in this area. And then we can also use these constrained areas to understand the impact of episodic events such as storms and hurricanes and also flooding. And we can look at them over longer periods of time than to integrate that and look at the effects of climate change such as El Niños or other kinds of climate modes. And finally, we can take this research and help the fish pond practitioners do better. And of course El Niño is an ocean warming event. Yes, yes. Thank you for helping me to explain that. Yeah, it's a global event, but in Hawaii it tends to have more, have different impacts than on the continent. So for example, it has decreased trade winds, increased sea surface temperatures. If there's fog, we really feel the effect of fog, and because of the increased sea surface temperatures, we also often see an increase in storm events. And so all of those impact our coasts and we can use the fish pond as sites to study these kind of changes. And the native Hawaiians way before Western contact came up with this idea. Correct. So you brought along a cartoon, I think of what a traditional native Hawaiian fish pond would be like. So how are they constructed? How big are they? Right. And this is the story of Lehua Ula, which is the first fish pond constructed ever, and it's in Hana on the island of Maui. And so the person featured there is Kula, who was this amazing fish practitioner who understood fish very well. And so knowing kind of the phenology and the patterns of how fish behaved, he was able to construct a wall. And you can see the wooden gate at the bottom there is the sluice gate, or in Hawaiian terms it's called maka ha, maka meaning eyes, and ha meaning breath. So it was the breath of the fish pond of how it breathed in and out, and that refers to the water exchange. And the next slide I think will show the modern day example where you're conducting Yes. Much of your research. Exactly. And so this is an image of Heia fish pond, again on the Windward Coast, and it's an 88 acre pond. And to give you some framework for that, it's as if you put all of Alamoana shopping center and the parking lot could all fit in Heia fish pond. And you can see that there's, the white part of that is the coral wall, and you can also see some exposed mud, and what that is, is those are the remnants of mangroves, which are invasive, and they've been cleared away, but there's a lot of sediment that's left over, and that messes with the functioning, the normal functioning of the fish pond. Now we had Brian Glazier also from the oceanography department on the show a few weeks ago, and he was talking about developing sensors to put in the same fish pond. Correct. So you've been thinking that we're trying to restore the fish pond to its former glory. What kind of research is being done there? So there's a large research group, or Hui, as we like to call ourselves in Hawaiian, of researchers at UH who are working with the practitioners to help them understand the changes that their fish pond is undergoing. And so they range from biologists who are trying to understand the trophic levels. We have botanists like Celia Smith, who's trying to help us understand what are the seaweed kind of things. We have Margaret McManus and Kathleen Ruttenberg in oceanography, who are helping us to understand the water chemistry and the flux. And then you have microbiologists like myself and Keanna Frank and Craig Nelson, and Craig and I are also part of this coastal sustainability cluster. Sounds like a lot of new people I can get on the show, but there must be community engagement, because this is so important to the health and vigor of our coastlines. Absolutely. So we are intimate partners with not only the fish pond practitioners themselves, we also bring in Hui Malama Local Eel, which is the statewide fish pond organization. And we also partner with Kua, which is a group that helps to facilitate these. And so, for example, Brian just had a huge sensor workshop, where he was able to teach the local fish pond practitioners how to install and care for and monitor these systems. And so, we can string together kind of a sentinel network of fish pond sites across the state. And we can really understand the effects of sea level rise and, again, storm impacts. So it's a really wonderful way to get more information. It sounds a great example of how UH Manoa faculty are really crucial to sort of the health of Hawaii, the economic development, and also, presumably, protecting the coastline. Absolutely. And of course, we are also changed by interacting with the community. It really provides us a way to connect in a meaningful way and to help make a difference in these communities. So it's very rich. So what exactly do you do? You brought along some other slides, which will show, we've talked in general about a fish pond and why it's important. Can we just go into a little bit of the science? And here we're looking at a food web. Yes. So Local Eel is the Hawaiian word for fish pond. And so we're looking at the way that it works. It all starts with the sun, of course. And we have photosynthesis with both the large seaweed that's at the bottom, as well as these tiny photosynthetic organisms or primary producers. And they're interacting with the nutrients in the fish pond. And the base of the food web is really microbes. And I'm a microbiologist. So I'm really interested in understanding how the microbes are driving all of these processes. But they make the food. And then the grazers, which is on the right-hand side, they eat these little organisms. And of course, the fish can eat these grazers or they can even eat the algae themselves. And so that's how you grow the fish. And a fish pond is kind of like the fish or a captive audience. Is that correct? Correct. Yeah, they can't swim out into the open ocean. So that's one of the really interesting things about the makaha or these sluice gates. They have been sized so that little fish can come in and leave. And they come in and then they get fat. And they get big and they can't leave. And so it's really the sizing of these is what the Hawaiians use to kind of capture the right size of fish. They don't overfish. That's right. So they have a population. They just take the larger adults and their babies can. Yeah. What about the water chemistry? You've got a sluice gate. So is it salt water or is it fresh water? So you have a combination of salt and fresh water creating a lot of brackish water environments. And so it's the rich nutrients coming from the dirt on land or the taraginous inputs. And it's mixing. And those nutrients, specifically nitrogen and phosphate, those are the building blocks that are required for photosynthesis and the growth of the organisms that the baby fish like to eat. And do you have some idea if they've got more nutrients, that they've got more food available? How much fish can you actually produce in these fish? So we can do a really rough back of the envelope calculation. And so Kekuchi, like I said, did an archaeological survey in the 60s and 70s. So we know from that there were about 488 fish ponds originally. And then from a report done in like the early 1900s Cobb, we know what the productivity per acre is. And so we can kind of do some kind of fancy math. We come up with about 2 million pounds of fish per year just from fish ponds. And so that's not counting near shore fishing on the reef or even deep shore fishing. So that's a significant amount. Any idea how that compares to the total fishing take? Well, I can say if we think about the number of meals that it was a significantly larger amount of meals from fish than that we would be locally sourcing than we currently do. And as you said earlier, the fact that this is available year round as opposed to when you can't go out on the North Shore during the winter storms, for example, this must have been a really good reliable food source. Yeah, so it really was the ingenuity of understanding fish migratory patterns and understanding their spawning cycles as well as nutrients and also selecting the fish. So the fish in the fish pond are primarily herbivorous. And so that way you can grow a lot more herbivores in the small space than you could a predator. You could probably go 100 of herbivores and maybe like 10 or one predator. Let's see some of your science in the next slide. Let's take a look and see what it actually is. All right, so here we've got something integrated knowledge system. Looks complicated, so just walk us through. Sure, so in trying to restore the fish ponds, what we really are trying to do is take an integrated approach. So if you look on the left-hand side, that's our idea of what the ancient ecosystem looked like. It had a lot of different species. It was very, very productive. And then due to changes like development and other kinds of things, now in the past it was pretty low productivity and low biodiversity. And where we're moving to now is trying to build that back up. And we utilize both local ecological knowledge from local fishers as well as what we call Ike Kupuna or Ancestral Knowledge as well as Hawaiian newspaper archives. And we bring that together with things that we do in oceanography like biogeochemistry, circulation, and other physical things. And these three triangles with different type is an ancient ecosystem might be pre-Western contact? Correct, so the ancient ecosystem is definitely probably at the height of productivity for these fish ponds. And the past ecosystem... We would say maybe 19th century or 19th, 20th century. So we are just starting to recover this. That's right, that's our goal. All right, and presumably a lot of people in the community are trying to promote this. Definitely. How do they get to hear about what you're trying to do? Well, so once a semester we have a science night that we've organized at the fish pond. And this year it's gonna be on December 7th from 5.30 to 7.30 p.m. So UH faculty will actually go and provide outreach to a community and then to see we've got the advance publicity up on the screen right now. That's right, if you're interested, you can email admin at pipiohaea.org And yeah, it's a community man at the fish pond. Pipi, P-A-E-P-A-E-O-H-E-E-I-A.org. And you're involved in that, presumably? Yes, I actually began organizing it when I started my faculty position because I saw that there was all this wonderful research and the community was really interested in what are you guys doing at the fish pond? So I said, why don't we just have a potluck get together and that's what it is today. Oh really, so social gathering as opposed to just a scientific lecture. And informal lectures with potluck and people sit around and talk story and it's a really great way to break barriers down between community and researchers and also between different researchers at UH. And presumably it's also very helpful for you if you get to talk to village elders about what conditions were, say, in the mid 20th century or before. That's exactly right. A kupuna elder led me to realize that perhaps there were some long-term effects of El Nino on the fish ponds and that actually led to a paper that's in review right now. Fascinating. Well, we're getting near the mid-show break. Sure. Rosie, when we come back though, I would really like to know how did you get into this field? So let me just remind our viewers, you are watching Think Tech Hawaii Research in Manoa. I'm your host, Pete McGinnis-Marc and my guest today is Dr. Rosie Elagato, who's an assistant professor in the Oceanography Department at UH Manoa. And we'll be back in about a minute's time. See you then. This is Think Tech Hawaii, Raising Public Awareness. Aloha, my name is Mark Shklav. I'm the host of Think Tech Hawaii's Law Across the Sea. Law Across the Sea comes on every other Monday at 11 a.m. Please join us. I like to bring in guests that talk about all types of things that come across the sea to Hawaii, not just law, love, people, ideas, history. Please join us for Law Across the Sea, Aloha. Hello, I'm Helen Dora Hayden, the host of Voice of the Veteran, seen here live every Thursday afternoon at 1 p.m. on Think Tech Hawaii. As a fellow veteran and veterans advocate with over 23 years experience serving veterans, active duty and family members, I hope to educate everyone on benefits and accessibility services by inviting professionals in the field to appear on the show. In addition, I hope to plan on inviting guest veterans to talk about their concerns and possibly offer solutions. As we navigate and work together through issues, we can all benefit. Please join me every Thursday at 1 p.m. for the Voice of the Veteran. Aloha. And welcome back to Think Tech Hawaii Research in Manoa. I'm your host, Pete McGinnis-Mark, and my guest today is Dr. Rosie Alagardo, who is an assistant professor in the Department of Oceanography at UH Manoa. I'm Rosie, for the viewers. Let me just point out, you're a world-class scientist. Thank you. MIT. Yes. Stanford and Berkeley. And I graduated from Kamehameha. Three almost comparable schools to UH Manoa. Yes. Tell me a little bit about your background. How does a Hawaiian lady get to be so good as you are? Oh, well, I mean, what's your background? Well, I definitely have to thank my parents, who are and were professors here actually at UH in the Ethnic Studies Department. And I guess what I want to say about that is that growing up in an academic department as a person of color, what it really did was it normalized the experience of academia for me. So even though they weren't in science, what it gave me was the idea of, this is how it works. And so that was one thing. I wanted to be a professor, but my parents were like, don't be a humanities professor. Luckily, though, I really fell in love with science when I was at Kamehameha schools, and I was in a wonderful science research program there. And that really gave me the confidence through doing science fair to pursue science as my major and as a career at MIT. Right. So you're a local product. Yes. How do we get more women Hawaiian students to be successful in their academic careers but stay in Hawaii? Yeah, I mean, I think that that's definitely an issue for local Kama'ina students who wanna become scientists and particularly those who wanna stay in research because there is this paradigm that you have to go away in order to come back. And I think what we have to do, certainly I was away for 17 years and I ask myself constantly, was that necessary? I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm very thankful for my experiences, but I think we have to develop more flexible models of how we do academic science. For example, SoEST is now ranked 13th in the world. SoEST is the School of Ocean, Earth, Science, and Technology at New Richmond. And the science, the geosciences there are ranked 13th in the world. That's better than MIT and Stanford. So you can get an amazing undergraduate education here. Now the question is, how do you proceed from there? And I think what we need to do is we need to break down those kind of biases against especially local students staying at home and maybe kind of figure out ways to see, well, if a student is in, say for example, global environmental science, can they then be an oceanography student? What should they do after that? Can they go and do a postdoctoral fellowship in the College of Natural Sciences? And I think what we need to do and consider is think about as researchers and professors building consortia between UH and other universities so that we have this rich research program that allows students not only to do research in Hawaii because it's such a wonderful living laboratory, but then maybe to go away for short sabbaticals for maybe three months or six months away to other institutions to train and learn new skills. So to get that outside experience but not having to force them to be away for so long, that's very difficult. Okay, we should talk to UH President David Leisner about this sort of thing. Yeah, that would be great. And presumably as you're working on the fish ponds, you encounter youngsters, Hawaiian students who are trying to develop their careers, who can then see the value of the kind of work that you're doing. Absolutely, I mean, having undergrads in my lab has been absolutely critical to the success of my lab. Also as a new professor, you know, it's difficult in the beginning to get funding for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, but it's actually easier to pay undergrads. And so it's been great to have interns and I've had a number of, I think I've had 11 interns in my lab since joining and of those, one of them has become my graduate student and he has been able to get independent funding through the Hau'oli Malawa Foundation. And then I've also had a SOAS young investigator, Keana Frank, who's gone on to be an assistant professor in the Pacific Biosciences Research Center. And so, yeah, I really think that not only have these field experiences been a pathway for students, but also being open to pursuing these alternative ways of trying to get students educated. And mentoring and showing the relevance of the country. Absolutely. But, you know, on this particular show, I often make the point, you know, UH Manoa has world-class investigators. Absolutely. You've been through MIT in Stanford and Berkeley and then you come back. And so, all of our students and the other high school students and below them have this opportunity. Not only that, we also have really great models of consortium building. So for example, Seymour, the Center for Microbial Oceanography, Research and Education is a prime example of a center that has built itself on having this kind of model of multiple different universities coming together to do research at UH and enabling students to be exposed to other kinds of research, but also, you know, different institutions. So I think that's the kind of direction that we need to go in. I agree entirely. Let's take a look a little bit more at some of the research which you've been doing. So we're looking at a map of... This is the fish pond in particular. So this is a different view. So you can see relative to where Oahu is, Heia Fish Pond is in Kaneohe Bay and you can see specifically where both the freshwater inputs are and the saltwater inputs. So they exchange back and forth, like I said, creating a brackish water environment. So that's what feels like. And the fish pond is directly fed by one of the streams. That's correct. And this access to the fish pond allows us to have really high resolution sampling. So we can have repeat sampling, really good data. Let's take a look at another one. So this is much more complicated. So please tell the viewers what it is we're looking at. Okay, so if we start on the pictures on the top row, what we're looking at is a comparison between what the land looked like in 1928 versus 2008. So focus on all the little squares to the left-hand side and that area is the wetland. And then you can see the fish pond looks really dark. That's good. That's a really healthy fish pond. Now if you look to the picture on the right, you can see the fish pond looks kind of muddy and now instead of all those squares which represent agriculture, you have grassland and that grassland really is taking up a lot of nutrients and sucking it down and so that's really affecting the productivity. And on the bottom, what we're looking at is basically a timeframe of what has happened in this area and the changes in terms of introduction of mangrove and urbanization that have really altered the fish pond. Well, this is really interesting because your expertise as a microbiologist looking say in the fish pond. Correct. You now have to extend your studies to look at how land use just in land and land use change over the decades is really impacted. So there must be an awful lot of interdisciplinary kind of investigations. This project has been wonderful in kind of facilitating interaction. And so for example, one of the professors that works in the uplands of Heia is Henrietta Doolai. And so working with kind of geologists and stream hydrologists, chemical kind of biogeochemists has really offered that opportunity for us to really look at that interaction. And what I think is amazing is most people think of microbes as really only working in their local environment but what we can now do by bringing together physical oceanographers, biogeochemists and me is we can look at how these all integrate on a much larger scale, both spatially and time-wise. And you mentioned land use, presumably that affects the amount of nutrients that are running off from fertilizer and that sort of thing. Yeah, so it's been really, really great. And again, not only have we been working with Henrietta Doolai, we've been working with the Nature Conservancy as well as Kakaol Eevee, which is another community group. This watershed is really connected by community groups. Gotta ask, who funds this? Is it at the national level, at the state level, private endowment? So the grants that are funding this come from various different pots of money. One is Sea Grant. Sea Grant has been able to help us on a shoestring budget, keep this going. But I've also received monies from the USGS and in particular. Sea Grant is run out of UH Minoa. Correct. USGS is the US Geological Survey. Correct. It's based here in Honolulu. Yes, so USGS has funded this work. The students themselves have been funded from the Hau'oli Maloa Foundation. Like I said, I've also gotten funding from the Department of Health through the EPA funding the Department of Health because they're very interested in how not just run off like nutrients, but potentially how pathogens or other kinds of bacteria might be moving through the watershed and growing or blooming. And do you see this as sort of a three, five, 10 year project? Well. When will you know that you're successful? I mean, I think the thing is when you work with community, it's a long-term commitment. So I think it's definitely longer than three or five or hopefully even 10 years. When you, I think that's one of the things that as a researcher, it's something you have to learn, especially with Hawai'i and local communities, is that you should get in for the long haul and get it in dirty for the long haul. Correct. Yes, when you're students and new faculty members and that sort of thing. And presumably, are you trying to do fish pond restoration or reintroduce fish or what kind of. So a lot of that is driven by our community steward, Paipai Ohai'ia. So they have written grants, for example, in collaboration with Conservation International. They recently got a Salston Kennedy grant through NOAA to look at how they can repopulate the fish pond. And of course, we are coming on board with saying, well, we know what the, we have the baseline. And so we can kind of help inform how altering these aquaculture practices might change that. And so even though we haven't gotten exact funding, you know, the fish pond has, we can help with those efforts. And let's just remind the viewers before we come to a close about this community engagement which you had. You've got a special evening, December 7th. Maybe we can just put on some information on the screen as well so that people will know how to contact. Yes, yes. So it's coming up on December 7th. Yes, it's coming up on December 7th from 5.30 to 7.30 p.m. And again, please email RSVP to admin at PaipaiOhai'ia.org. And we'd love to see the community come out and learn about the things that are going on at the fish pond. And actually all throughout UH, sometimes we ask people who are working on fisheries to come and give talks or just things that might inform the practices at the fish pond. And so this is in Canary Bay. This is getting a chance to see the fish pond and presumably talk about restoration. Yeah, and if people are interested, they can also volunteer at community work days. Those are held on alternative Saturdays of the month. What do you do at the community work days? Oh, you move rock. Oh, you just move rock. You move rock, you cut down mangrove. Why would you be moving rock? Well, you're rebuilding the fish pond wall because the mangrove was very invasive and its roots have actually busted down the fish pond wall. So we're trying to rebuild the fish pond wall and to increase the functionality and also cut down the mangrove. Does that mean that the wall is leaking right now? Yes, actually due to the result of some floods, there is some leakage in parts of the wall. And so while most of the wall has been restored, there's still parts of it, particularly on the stream side. So this December 7th meeting would be really important, trying to get more volunteers. So a lot of work to be done on the fish ponds. Sure. But also just for the university to engage with the community. Yes, I think it's incredibly important that we're part of the community and it's important for us to engage in the community with research and also showing opportunities where students can get involved in the research. Well, you mentioned research and I apologize. We've not covered half of the research topics which you've prepared. Maybe that's a good opportunity to have you back sometime. I would love to. If you could, Rosie. It's been really interesting, particularly for myself as a planetary geologist. I didn't know about fish ponds in Hawaii sort of thing, really good. But let me just remind the viewers, you have been watching Think Tech Hawaii research in Manoa. I've been your host, Pete McGinnis-Marc and my guest today has been Dr. Rosie Alagardo, who is an assistant professor in the Department of Oceanography at UH Manoa. We've been talking about fish ponds and hopefully Rosie, you can come back soon and tell us a bit more about your research. Thank you. Thank you for coming. I'd love to. Until next time, goodbye for now.