NARS Commission renews call for immediate ban of Myrtaceae

"This one, to me, is right up there with the red imported fire ant. I can't think of a worse pest," says NARS Commissioner Lloyd Loope.

To everyone who has mourned the recent loss of countless wiliwili trees to the invasive erythrina gall wasp, which swept through the state like a wildfire, Loope says that is nothing compared to what a new strain of the rust known as Puccinia psidii could do to our ohia trees, which are the most dominant species in native Hawaiian forests.

While this ohia rust has already been found in Hawaii on both ohia and rose apple, Loope worries that the continued importation of Myrtaceae (the family of plants that include [sic] ohia, guava and eucalyptus) will bring in a strain that could knock our forests dead.

Last year, prompted by Loope and the NARS Commission, DLNR director Peter Young sent a letter to the state Department of Agriculture asking it to immediately halt the importation of Myrtaceae. In 2005, the DOA issued a new pest advisory on the rust encouraging people not to transport any Myrtaceae between islands. A few months after the letter from Young, at the request of the DOA's plant quarantine branch, Loope said he put together a rule package to address the rust threat. Rules were drafted and were making their way through the public and agency review process, but were stuck behind a long queue of rules for other things, he said.

In the meantime, in December on Maui, quarantine officials intercepted a rust-infected plant from California. Before then, officials assumed that the rust would come from plants from Florida or Brazil, Loope said.

Because the rust is now even closer to home, Loope again raised the issue of asking the DOA to implement emergency rules prohibiting the importation of Myrtaceae. At its January meeting, the commission again discussed how to get the DOA to take immediate action against the importation of this pest and decided that this time they would recommend that Peter Young speak in person with DOA director Sandra Kunimoto about the problem, since there never was a response to his letter.

Commissioner Flint Hughes noted, "This is like the gall wasp, but the difference is we didn't know about the gall wasp coming. We know [the rust] is. If we don't do anything, it's our fault."

Commissioner Pat Conant also noted that the DOA's mandate includes the protection of both crops and forests.

If a destructive strain does arrive and starts attacking ohia, Loope said the watershed partnerships, which receive millions of dollars of public and private funds to protect natural areas statewide, will go out of business.

"Some people may say, 'Lloyd, you're over-reacting.'...[But] internationally, this is the biggest threat to eucalyptus in the world," he said. 

The Hawaiian Ecosystems at Risk (HEAR) project is currently funded by the Pacific Basin Information Node (PBIN) of the National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII) through PIERC (USGS) with support from HCSU (UH-Hilo). More details are available online.

This page was created on 02 April 2007 by PT, and was last updated on 02 April 2007 by PT.