Ka Wai Ola - Office of Hawaiian Affairs, Volume 12, Number 9, 1 September 1995 — Ke ao nani [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Ke ao nani

Naturally Hawaiian

by Patrick Ching artist/environmental ist

Hawai'i's little creatures

Imagine a plaee with gigantic dragonflies. carnivorous caterpillars, singing snails, happyface spiders, blind cave

crickets and refreezable volcano bugs. It sounds like a cross between a scifi horror film and Aliee in Wonderland, but actually all of the aforementioned creatures exist within one of

Earth's best showcases of evolution — the Hawaiian islands. Being that Hawai'i is iso!ated from the nearest land mass by 2,300 miles of oeean, the creatures that arrived here eame by air or by sea. Some blew over in the wind while others eame attached to birds. Still others floated here on drifting debris. The creatures that successfully colonized the islands quickly evolved to adapt to their new environments. īn the case of

insects, scientists estimate that about 400 original colonizers eventually evolved into more than 10,000 native

Hawaiian species. The largest Hawaiian insect is a six-inch dragonfly called Pinao. It is meīallie blue-green in color and is the largest dragonfly in the United States. Until 1972 it was believed that caterpillars were strict

vegetarians. During that year entomologist Steve Montgomery discovered an ambushing, fly-eat-ing moth caterpillar that shocked the science world. A variety of small spiders with faces on their abdomens are lurking in Hawaiian forests. These "Happyface spiders" display various facial expressions whieh may fool a predator into attacking their tail ends instead of their heads. Brilliantly colored tree snails about the size of a thumbnail are

known to Hawaiians as pupu-kani-oe. According to Hawaiian lore the snails have the ability to whistle or "sing." High on the summits of Hawai'i's tallest volcanoes lives a bug with a natural antifreeze in its blood. The wekiu bug ean withstand freezing temperatures and lives in crevices in the lava. It scavenges the carcasses of other little creatures that get blown up into the freeze zone. Though there are hundreds of native moth species īn Hawai'i there are only two species of Hawaiian butterfly. The Kamehameha butterfly is bright orange with black trim and white spots. The Hawaiian word of butterfly is pulelehua whieh, loosely translated, means "spirit of the lehua blossom." The other species of butterfly, Udara hlaekburni. is a small bluish-gray insect named after Rev. Thomas Blackburn, who was one of the first serious collectors of Hawai'i's insects and arthropods.

This painting, titled "Pulelehua 'O Kamehameha, adorns a new poster published by Patrick Ching for Bishop Musuem.