Nature will always lose to radiation poisoning, including our children

I came to Lana’i to scuba dive with my photography partner Pamela Whitman so we could compair the reefs on this small dry island with the reefs along the wet north shore of Kauai! What we found on our fist dive was just stunning!

There is little to no run off from the land to the sea on Lanai and little to no farm chemicals. The coastline is basically a desert with a few beautiful sandy beaches between 1,000 foot cliffs. This should be and ideal setting for pristine coral reefs! No people and no pollution! Like it was 500 years ago!!

We were dead wrong. The coral reefs in Manele Bay look about the like the coral reefs along the north shore of Kauai!! Over 50% of the large mound and lobe corals we dissolved or partially dissolved! Looks like someone poured thousands of gallons of battery acid over the corals turning them brown and muddy.

What could cause this type of destruction? We talked with the local dive company owner who was born and raised on Lanai and has dove the pristine reefs for most of his life. He said the reefs looks excellent only a year ago and he could not figure out why they look like they were “dissolving”. That was his words, not mine!

He said there is no reason as to why they should die. He has kelp extremely good care of the reefs and he monitors any activity that could damage a reef. He also said he spent 20 years in the military!

I asked him if the military was doing any exercises outside of Manele Bay and he said YES!! He has seen many large battleships and submarines! When I told him about the reefs in Kauai dissolving during the RIMPAC military war games he put two and two together and was convinced that the military had fried his best reef where he takes most of his clients diving!

We are going to do additional dives to see how wide spread the damage is. One very unique part of our dive was the over abundance of parrotfish and other coral eating species. We must have seen 2,000 fish on the dive they were just in a feeding frenzy eating the dying diseased corals. All of the giant mound corals had parrotfish bite marks. The coral instead of being hard are now like ice cream to the fish. It was obvious that these fish were have the meal of a lifetime but it will be gone soon!!

Hopefully we will find better reefs sheltered from the military’s activities. It is getting harder and harder every day in Hawaii to escape the effects of the US military and their deadly electronic war games!

Aloha,

Terry Lilley
Marine Biologist
Hanalei, Kauai
http://underwater2web.com/
All Photographs © 2014 Terry Lilly

The Aegis Weapon System (AWS) is a centralized, automated, command-and-control (C2) and weapons control system that was designed as a total weapon system, from detection to kill. The heart of the system is the AN/SPY-1, an advanced, automatic detect and track, multi-function phased-array radar. This high-powered (4,000,000 watt) radar is able to perform search, track, and missile guidance functions simultaneously, with a track capacity of more than 100 targets. The first Engineering Development Model (EDM-1) was installed in the test ship, USS Norton Sound (AVM 1) in 1973.