Malama Maunalua Beach Clean Up
Saturday, March 10, 2018
The event took place at Malama Maunalua beach on Saturday, March 3rd, 2018 from 9:00 am to 12:00 pm. Due to the limit of parking lots, some students carpooled to the destination. Besides HKN, there were other volunteer groups coming from other high schools in the island including some individuals and experts from Pono Pacific. At 9:30am, we headed to the destination which was about one mile from the meeting place. We walked across a shallow water area along the bay to get to the volunteer area around Paiko Beach. Before volunteering, we were informed about the problems of invasive alien algae to the coral reefs and nearshore marine ecosystems. These non-native invasive species flourish off of an environment created by sediment and runoff from the land. As the population of these invasive species increase, it will grow over and smother coral reefs and native algal communities, killing extensive areas of habitat. Three of the main invasive algae in Maunalua Bay are Gorilla Ogo, Leather Mudweed, and Prickly seaweed. Our job was to remove these invasive species in a preset position. The bag was filled up to about one third before being transferred to the shore. At 11:30, we finished collecting and walked to the shoreline to transfer all the collected bags to Paiko for recycling. The event ended at 12:00pm as we returned to school.