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The Kamehameha Butterfly & Rare Hawaiian Tree Snail Get a Helping Hand

Pulelehua Project
Pulelehua Project
Nick Yee
Credit Nick Yee
Cynthia King

The Department of Land and Natural Resources is overseeing projects to save two of Hawai‘i’s smallest creatures.

Will Haines is an investigator with the Pulelehua Project.  He says people often think about endangered birds or plants… but forget that Hawai‘i has more than 5,000 species of native insects. 

The Pulelehua Project is working to reintroduce the Kamehameha butterfly into lower areas by selective breeding and release.  They’re currently surveying areas populated by m?maki plants, which serve as a host for the butterflies.  Cynthia King, an entomologist with the DLNR Division of Forestry and Wildlife.

monarch_full.mp3

army.mil
Credit army.mil

A different project is raising and releasing endangered Hawaiian tree snails into a specially built enclosure designed to exclude predators.  TheSnail Extinction Prevention Program just released the first 50 snails back into the wild, and is planning to release an additional hundred in the coming weeks. David Sischo is the Snail Extinction Prevention Program Coordinator for DLNR/DOFAW. 

snail_final.mp3

Nick Yee’s passion for music developed at an early age, as he collected jazz and rock records pulled from dusty locations while growing up in both Southern California and Honolulu. In college he started DJing around Honolulu, playing Jazz and Bossa Nova sets at various lounges and clubs under the name dj mr.nick. He started to incorporate Downtempo, House and Breaks into his sets as his popularity grew, eventually getting DJ residences at different Chinatown locations. To this day, he is a fixture in the Honolulu underground club scene, where his live sets are famous for being able to link musical and cultural boundaries, starting mellow and building the audience into a frenzy while steering free of mainstream clichés.
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