Hess explains that researchers soak the sponges in yeasty water to attract fruit flies, then return a couple of hours later with an aspirator to suck them up for study. I look up to see a blue kitchen sponge attached to the trunk of an ohia tree, as though someone else had had that same thought. We no longer see lava underfoot, because it’s buried under 3,000 to 5,000 years of rotted logs and leaves. Hey, Lava, you missed a spot. As we push into the interior, tree ferns come into view and thick undergrowth slows our travel. It’s like when my husband takes the clippers to his hair. Hess points out Hawaiian blueberries, which are less blue (they’re red) than other states’ blueberries.Īfter 15 minutes of hiking, a stand of older-growth ohia trees appears on our right: kipuka! Although it’s small (about nine acres) and no sign marks the boundary, it’s not hard to locate. Other than a few six-foot ohia trees, we’re the tallest organisms on the trail. (Pahoehoe’s Scrabble-friendly cousin aa-a sort of knee-high stone popcorn-is also plentiful in the area, but challenging to hike.) Though the vegetation along the path is sparse, there’s abundant beauty in the contrast of the black lava and the bright greens of the shrubs and grasses that manage to take root in the organic debris that settles between mounds of pahoehoe. Kaumana Trail is an easy hike, winding over broad, rounded moon pies of pahoehoe lava. The Hawaiian Drosophila Project, begun in the 1960s, is still going strong.) (And seemingly as many drosophila researchers. From one (or a few) original immigrants from Asia, Hawaii now has as many as 800 drosophila species. And drosophila are poor fliers, rarely commuting between kipukas. A generation comes and goes in a couple of weeks, so evolved traits show up much more quickly than they would in mammals. In part, this is because they’re short-lived. (Nearby Puu Oo Trail also traverses kipukas.) A lot of the evolution research done here has focused on drosophila-fruit flies. Geological Survey’s Pacific Island Ecosystems Research Center, offered to show me around a couple of kipukas alongside the Kaumana Trail, on Mauna Loa’s eastern flank. Steve Hess, a wildlife biologist who works out of the Kilauea Field Station of the U.S. Hawaii, one scientist wrote, “is God’s gift to the evolutionist.” And because lava flows are easily datable, scientists can look at two closely related species and know which evolved from which. Six original colonizations of bird ancestors have become 110 species. From as few as 350 insect and spider colonizers, for instance, Hawaii now has 10,000 species. Kipukas help explain Hawaii’s extraordinary rate of speciation.
Drift far enough genetically, and you become a new species. If the environments in their respective kipukas differed, they adapted to the local conditions and began to evolve separately. Members of species that used to share turf and swap genes got separated by Nature’s igneous paving crews. Sometimes the greenery was spared because it was at a higher elevation than the surrounding terrain, and sometimes it just got lucky. They’re pocket forests isolated by lava flows that went around them instead of over. Kipukas have been described as living laboratories for evolution. But don’t overlook Mauna Loa (also active but currently “in repose”). You can see Kilauea’s churning “lake” from overlooks in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, and you can watch its lava tubes bleed into the ocean several miles southeast.įor all these reasons, Kilauea is the park’s star attraction. I forgive the volcanologists, because no words I know adequately capture the beautiful, violent strangeness of molten lava. As though, had I a more powerful pair of binoculars, I could make out rowboats and little people picnicking on the shore. Here is the term for the roiling, spattering 2,000-degree Fahrenheit liquid rock visible in the caldera of Kilauea volcano this afternoon: lava lake. Volcanologists have a flair for understatement.
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