Christy Martin

Christy Martin, 42, finds her life intertwined with those of snakes, bugs, frogs, fungi, all manner of terrestrial creatures. Odd, considering that her degree was in marine biology.

"I like to tell people I evolved," she said with a laugh. "I crawled up onto the land."

Martin is the coordinator and serves as spokesperson for the Coordinating Group on Alien Pest Species, a coalition of state and federal agencies formed in 1995 to search for solutions to the state’s invasive-species problem. Part of her work has been to promote public awareness about the repercussions from the critters people bring in, intentionally or otherwise, but the group’s main focus has been to have better communications among government agencies that previously haven’t communicated much.

She advocates legislative improvements such as the recent boost in the surcharge paid on cargo imports to help finance state inspections. Keeping out the unwanted species is always the better option than trying to eradicate them later, she said.

Now the mother of a 2-year-old daughter, Martin remembers her own small-kid days when she’d horrify her own mom by capturing little reptiles. So she was amused when she was tapped to go to Guam and learn about how to catch brown tree snakes.

"I just laughed and called my mom and said, ‘Guess what, the state’s paying me to keep these things now!’" she said.

QUESTION: How are the coqui frogs being brought over from the Big Island to Oahu?

ANSWER: It’s completely accidental. They’re hiding in nursery products, primarily, although we’ve seen them also travel in bumpers of cars being shipped. It’s a hiding place; it’s a place to take refuge, and cars echo nicely. … They’re looking for a safe hiding place where they can call for mates. The males are the ones that call. They’re doing their “Co-QUI” call for girlfriends. And the louder an echo-y place that they can get, the better. It’s an amplified, “Hey, sweetie!” kind of thing, “C’mon over here.”

Q: Even with a zero-tolerance policy, what is the confidence that we’ve got all Oahu coquis?

A: With nurseries continuing to send dirty products, very low.

Q: What was the origin of Hawaii’s general challenge with invasive species?

A: I think one of the problems really is that we’re a center, a hub for people moving around. The other problem is that so many of the laws involving invasive species at this point, and movement of commerce, are antiquated. They don’t take into account that airlines and the Internet can move things so much faster and across borders that they never really would have been able to in the past. … Here’s the big problem: At international ports, all of those people, all the cargo coming from international, they are inspected by the federal agencies — Customs and Border Protection, U.S. Department of Agriculture, and Fish and Wildlife plays a small role in endangered species movement from international ports. They are working under federal laws. So they have a list of federal pests that are pests to the greater U.S. that really don’t intersect with our pests. … The things coming from domestic ports are inspected by Hawaii Department of Agriculture. They’re very restrictive. They will look at different things, and if they don’t know what it is, they’ll stop it. If they know what it is and they know it shouldn’t be here, even if it’s not on the list, they’ll stop it.

Q: Wouldn’t the Hawaii banned-species list include those on the federal list?

A: Guilty until proven innocent is what we should be doing. And they do. But they (DOA inspectors) don’t inspect the international imports. So they’ve got this great policy and a very progressive stance for domestic imports; they can’t touch international imports, though. It’s not their jurisdiction.

Q: So how do you deal with that?

A: Well, … there’s two ways. One is to try to get federal recognition that Hawaii is special, and that the federal agents need to be almost deputized to help Hawaii look for the pests that are on our list, or at least adhere to some of our standards.

Q: “Special” because of our exposure?

A: Our exposure as well as, you know, we’re a gateway to the United States, the greater continent. … Our congressional staff has been fantastic in trying to make that argument, but we’ve gotten nowhere yet. So, the other possibility — and this is one that we’re actively pursuing — is try to get joint inspection facilties at each port. There is an example of it working in Kahului. … Kahului Airport wanted to expand its runway … and there were some community groups that got together and sued. They didn’t want the airport runway expanded to get more flights from more places. They won, and part of the settlement was for the Department of Transportation to help build a state-of-the-art inspection facility, and they also support some of the inspectors there. And they find more things at that port; it houses federal agencies, they work side by side.

Q: So that could be a pilot for what you want to happen at every airport?

A: It has been functioning as a pilot; it’s got fantastic evidence that it works. … If they use common spaces and they’re talking to each other all the time, then they call each other over and say, “Hey, I’ve got some strange ants in this one you might want to take a look at.” … Everybody had a reduction in force, Kahului’s also. But they were finding thousands of pests in a six-month period, whereas Oahu would find a couple hundred. Kahului gets less than 5 percent of the incoming goods. Why are they finding 1,000 different things? Because it works.

Q: Which species cause the greatest concern?

A: I don’t think that is actually an answerable question, and here’s why. We get lots of insects that come in, but we also get a lot of snails and slug-type creatures. But you also take a look at something like a plant disease. And one good example of tremendous plant-disease problems we’ve had, and that’s ohia rust or guava rust, as it’s sometimes called. That came in, we discovered, in 2005 because it was spreading in the forest. It attacks myrtle-family plants. Those are ohia, guava as well as rose apple and some native Hawaiian species. We noticed it because it started killing rose (or mountain) apple trees; today it’s hard to find a rose apple tree still alive. These are the dead sticks that you see when you drive up Likelike. … Ohia is what gives us water. It’s the reason we have water coming out of our ground that we can drink.

Q: Really? How so?

A: It helps collect water, and if you see ohia trees, they have a lot of mosses and lichens growing outside. So it holds water in the environment; it holds the mist. It collects it on their moss and some of it drips down very slowly and, 25 years later, it gets into the watershed. … Ohia covers more than a million acres of watershed forest. If you could imagine a new strain of rust coming in that could attack that, and we could see the same results as rose apple, we would be in so much trouble. So I can’t say insects or plant disease (is worse) — take your pick.

Q: Would you say snakes, which have been getting all the attention, are less of a problem, then?

A: I would be hard-pressed also (to say). Likewise I can’t choose between insects and plant diseases and mollusks, I don’t think I could say that snakes wouldn’t be as big as a disaster.

Q: It’s not as bad a situation as the brown tree snakes on Guam, right?

A: Yes. But if you look at statistics from the types of snakes they’re collecting: tree dwelling, so they would do some of the same damages there; they have just about the same reproductive capacities; they have the same tendencies to eat birds. What is different? Not a lot.

Q: Any success stories in eradicating pest species?

A: Maui very recently eradicated a newly found population of the little fire ant. Little fire ant isn’t like your regular picnic ant. … They are nesting all the way from in the ground, all the way up trees to the tops of trees, and they infest agriculture, a lot of times. … Another problem that they found is that when densities get so high they move into people’s houses. And we’ve seen on the Big Island, where some of these populations are, they’ve had to go and close the preschool, send in the exterminators, tent the building, use foggers, things like that, just to be able to let the kids back in. They’re also known to sting animals that live outside. These ants are known to a few places on the Big Island — again, nursery trade issues. It was found very early on Maui at one location, and it was eradicated. We had very few tools to be able to do the job, because nobody knows how to kill ants in trees … nothing was approved by pesticide agencies to apply into a tree to kill ants up there. Thank heavens we had a specialist on board that developed a program to do that, and he eradicated it. So Maui is little-fire-ant-free, for now.

Q: Besides the cargo surcharge increases, any other legislative advances?

A: We got the request for the (state) Department of Transportation to cooperate with us. I would love to say we get great buy-in from them, but we just don’t. … They contend that inspection isn’t part of an airport function, and that we have no business being there. Isn’t that just crazy? Hello, we get invasive species because airplanes are landing.