tracts too many moray eels. Many part 

 time fishermen work similar traps in off- 

 shore waters eighty to a hundred feet 

 deep. The traps are visited once or 

 twice a week and to prevent their be- 

 ing robbed or stolen the buoys are un- 

 derwater attached to an anchor rope and 

 located by landmarks on shore. The 

 most successful fishermen are those who 

 are best at finding their hidden traps. 



Halona Tide Pools 



The shelving projections of the rugged 

 Halona coast area hold a great many 

 elongated shallow splash pools above 

 high tide level. Here live the large ac- 

 tive rock skippers. Rock skippers are 

 blennies with high dorsal fins, long cau- 

 dal fin, and roving habits. Though more 

 active at night, they have no hesitation 

 about leaving the water and skipping 

 across the brown lava rocks, even during 

 the middle of the day when these rocks 

 are dry and heated by the sun. Often 

 when we approached the pools several 

 rock skippers would emerge and flip 

 away over the edge of the cliffs into the 

 foaming surf ten to fifteen feet below. 



We soon learned to approach care- 

 fully and to cut off their escape route to 

 the sea by means of a one-man net with 

 a long funnel that looks to a trapped 

 fish like a hole through which it may 

 escape. If, instead of making a dash for 

 the sea, the rock skippers chose to hide 

 in a hole in the rock or to wedge them- 

 selves under a ledge, one of us probed 

 with coat-hanger wire to tickle them from 



their hiding places. Besides being fast, 

 the fish were very clever at avoiding the 

 nets, instantaneously seeing a crevice 

 through which to escape or else jumping 

 around the net. Even in the collecting 

 bucket, they would scale the straight 

 metal sides part way and jump out when 

 the net cover was lifted. 



Trigger Fishes 



The reef in Maunalua Bay is flat and 

 fairly deep. In depths of twenty to thirty 

 feet, scattered trigger fishes swim slowly 

 around. A diver swimming after them 

 can chase them into a hole where they 

 lock themselves in by erecting their first 

 dorsal spine. Then the diver can reach 

 in, unlock the spine by depressing the 

 second "trigger" spine and pull the fish 

 out. Cautious divers look into the hole 

 first before reaching in, for there might 

 be a moray or sea urchin there. 



Coconut Island 



Coconut Island, on which the Univer- 

 sity of Hawaii Marine Laboratory is 

 located, lies in Kaneohe Bay on the 

 reef about a mile offshore. Reef fishes 

 taken in traps for various purposes by 

 the Lalx>ratory collector are freed in arti- 

 ficial ponds. Though the ponds are rela- 

 tively shallow with a mud bottom, sail- 

 fin tangs, moorish idols, sergeant-majors, 

 and island perch flourish there. We bor- 

 rowed a long seine from the Laboratory 

 and spent the morning collecting these 

 colorful fishes. 



The Laboratory collector regularly op- 



erates traps and the majority of fish — 

 butterflies, wrasses, file fish, lion fish, yel- 

 low tangs and unicorn fish — are kept in 

 large square wire boxes suspended from 

 a float in one of the lagoons. The fishes 

 we collected that were not used for ex- 

 perimental purposes were transferred to 

 the Aquarium tanks, being transported 

 in the live well of one of the Laboratory 

 skiffs. Those that died were preserved 

 for the Museum collection. 



Poisoning Tide Pools 

 in Kahuku Point 



It is much easier to collect fishes if you 

 don't need them alive. For example, 

 the method that produces the greatest 

 variety of fishes (often tiny secretive 

 species that cannot be caught any other 

 way) is to take them by means of a 

 chemical. The chemical first produces 

 an effect of asphyxiation, causing the 

 fish to leave their hiding places and 

 swim erratically. Many can be dipped 

 up still alive, while dead ones can be 

 found by carefully quartering back and 

 forth among the rocks and seaweeds cov- 

 ering the bottom. 



The day we chose for this work had a 

 convenient low tide at eleven a.m. The 

 place was Kahuku Point, the northern 

 tip of Oahu. The most favorable cir- 

 cumstance was a rare lack of wind, so 

 the surge was minimal. The resulting 

 collecting operation was a complete suc- 

 cess, yielding about eighty species for the 

 Museum, including unusual morays, 

 smaller yellow macaroni-shaped eels, as 



Left: Emptying quonsel-shaped wire fish trap on the ledge at hewalo Basin. Right: Using bag nets to catch rock skippers in splash pools on shelves above the high tide 

 line off the Halona coast. Water Jor these pools is splashed in by the breaking surf in the background. 7 he bag net prevents the agile rock skippers from escaping to 

 another pool or into the sea. Opposite page : A biologist from the State of Hawaii Fish and Game Department prepares to leave the Makua to make underwater photo- 

 graphs in artificial reefs eighty to ninety feet below the surface. .Vote the boxed waterproof camera on deck at right. 



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