More Hatchlings and Fish

Aloha!
Back at housing and time for another update (I know you’ve all been waiting on the edge of your seats ). This past trip was wonderful!! I was back at Pohue and got to excavate my first nest! We do an excavation after the nest has either surpassed its hatching window or has been hatching and stopped for a couple of days. This is to verify the percentage of hatchlings that survived by counting undeveloped eggs, dead hatchlings and egg shells left in the nest. I guess it can be quite disgusting digging it up if there are a lot of dead or decaying hatchlings (I’ll skip the details) but we got very lucky because we found a lot of live hatchlings! These particular hatchlings needed assistance getting out of the nest due to roots and rocks that were most likely inhibiting their emergence so it was a very good thing that we dug it up when we did. While doing an excavation you want to very slowly uncover the nest one shallow scoop of sand at a time so it took us a couple of hours. If there is any movement in the nest you stop and wait for the hatchlings to come out on their own and then let them imprint on the sand for a while before collecting them in a bucket and releasing them all into the ocean at the same time (safety in numbers). Total we found 110 hatchlings!!! It was probably one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen when we released them and 110 tiny hatchlings made their way to the ocean by moonlight. It’s incredible that they just know exactly where to go. Our total next success was somewhere around 65% which is actually really good. We did have one that was too underdeveloped to release and so we reburied him and dug him up two days later, not really expecting him to make it, but he looked great and had a fighting spirit! We named him Brave Heart and sent him out into the world .

Other than that we didn’t have any new mamas but we did get more fish from locals! These Hawaiians are seriously great! The owner of the property even brought us down some left over fried chicken one day and Gatorades! The fish was quite a process however because when we got them before, the locals had already fried them up. This time we received them alive and flopping around….after staring in the bucket for a while and examining the tools that we had to work with (a small propane stove, one pan and a slightly rusty steak knife) we made our plan of attack. It took us 2 and ½ hours but we eventually figured out a few things.

1. These fish are too small and difficult to fillet with a steak knife
2. You can’t eat through the scales
3. Don’t try to fry a fish before de-gutting
4. Don’t pierce the intestines

Out of 9 fish we managed to fry up 4 correctly and they were the best 4 fish I’ve ever tasted (probably just because we were so proud of ourselves by the end of it all).

We were feeling so good that we even decided to gather some opehe (sp?), kind of like a mussel, from the rocks and boil them. This was a bad idea because they were extremely chewy and made us all feel quite sick. Still working on that one.
Overall another great and successful trip, the weather is still beautiful everyday and we slept on the beach under the stars every night. Hopefully you are all still doing well and enjoying the fall (I do miss the changing leaves). Miss you, write if you get a chance.

Amy
P.S. If you want to see a video of the hatchlings check out facebook!!! Hopefully I'll have it uploaded

A beautiful brackish crack that we found. It is huge and about 20 ft deep.