ISLAND OF MOLOKAI

KUMIMI BAY:

This site was a fairly large south east facing bay. There was some evidence that this bay was used or had been used in the past as a boat harbor, fishing area or at least a place that fisherman bring their boats in to anchor. This is also a residential area with houses along the shoreline. A medium sized stream/river entered this site along the southern end of the bay. There was a very deep and wide channel that cut through the middle of the entire reef and extended out to the opening of the bay. The south side of the bay was composed of a large boulder field that was heavily silted from the nearby river mouth. The channel was approximately 50-80 meters wide and 10 meters deep with a sandy bottom and large coral colonies interspersed throughout. The edge of the channel where it met the reef flat on the east side of the bay had a lot of bathymetric complexity. There were small caves and channels in the limestone which eventually led to the reef flat itself. This area was very shallow (0.5 meters) and was heavily scoured by wave action. Many large herbivorous fish and small sea urchins were observed roaming around. The substrate here was mostly very scoured and heavily grazed turf algae with several small-medium sized coral colonies which increased in size as we moved off of the reef flat and towards the channel. The most common macroalgae was Galaxaura spp., Melanamansia glomerata, Turbinaria ornata, and Halimeda discoidea. There was no sign of alien/invasive algae in this bay.

Table 1.  Information regarding site characteristics and alien species abundances. The  number recorded for each alien species of algae is a ranking of the abundance of that species at each given site. Impact ranking values range from 0 (not present) to 10 (100% cover). 

Table 2.  Species list of all of the algal samples that were collected at this site. Alien species are displayed in green. 

Table 3.  Species list and relative abundance of herbivores at this location.