There sure are a lot of Hawaiian threads lately. Reminded me of another Hawaiian question.
I know that in some of the Hawaiian Islands, imported Indian mongeese (mongooses? a whole separate GQ thread) are everywhere. My question is, island Dopers, how everywhere are they? I mean, I saw them scampering across the road, in bushes, across fallen logs, through parking lots, etc. Do these little buggers get into your homes? They seem seem awfully inquisitive. I wouldn’t be surprised if they ended up under the hoods of your cars, like cats, or in the walls of your homes, like cats. What’s the poop?
Let’s settle this part right now. I thought everyone knew that the plural of “mongoose” is “polygoose”.
I have never been to to Hawaii (though I can say “humuhumunukunukuapua’a” on one breath), so I can’t help with the OT. I just couldn’t resist dusting off a very old joke.
On the Big Island, mongooses are the roadkill equivilant of 'possums on the mainland, and known for stealing backyard small game and fighting cats, occasionally. But I don’t recall having any domestic problems with them. Perhaps they don’t come indoors or cozy up with engine blocks because it isn’t cold enough to drive them to it? Perhaps they aren’t as brave with people as raccoons are, or their diet doesn’t tempt them into homes much (I know they hunt meat, and like to clean out rat burrows (the rats DO like to live in walls and attics, though)).
One person’s anecdotal evidence.
sorry, i lived for a while on Kauai without mongooses (?) but saw plenty of them on Oahu and the Big Islan. my relatives have never had problems with them in the house, though.
okay, i’ll admit it, i really just wanted to tell the story of how the mongoose was introduced to Hawai’i. the brilliant early haole leadership brought it to kill rats but later found out that the rats were nocturnal and the mongooses were (scientific word for animals active during the day…help) and their introduction did nothing to stem the rodent problem.
instead, the mongooses went on a rampage, virtually wiping out most of the native bird population. great.
if you think Hawai’i is paradise now, think of how it was in the “pre-contact” days when there were no flies or mosquitoes…
The word you were looking for is diurnal. And my experience is mongoose avoid areas of human habitation, at least in my tropic island (PR).
Mongoose got introduced here for the same reasons as in HI; all this achieved besides wiping out a lot of local fauna was to create our primary rabies vector. Later on, our enlightened colonial leaders brought in Cane Toads to attack crop pests, and they became pests themselves. Then some research lab brought in Rhesus monkeys in the 1940s and used cheap fences; then in the 70s some boob brought in baby cayman (alligator-like reptiles) and when they grew too large let them go in Tortuguero Lagoon; then in 1994 some africanized bees were on a ship from Brazil . . .
Now I know why we keep losing all the Mars probes, the natives are shooting them down lest we bring in any pests
BTW, if while in the Big Island of Hawai’i you hear the coqui frogs, those are ours. I understand some folk there find them annoying (we, OTOH, love them). At some point the Powers That Be in the US decided that since we both were cane-growing islands, we could casually move whole shiploads of farm equipment and farm laborers between one and the other.
jrd
Ah, but do you know what it means?
“Haole”, btw, means foreigner. People of Caucasian descent are called “haole” here, even if they were born here (in which case, they can be called the oxymoronic “local haole”). 99% of the time, it is not intended to be racist.
damn, i always think diurnal is a synonym for “daily.” thanks, folks.
JRDelirious, not sure if you know of another Hawaii-Puerto Rico connection. in the early part of the 20th century, plantation owners brought many Puerto Ricans to Hawai’i because they figured they were used to cane plantation life (they tried this because the Hawaiians, Chinese and Japanese kept leaving. not because they couldn’t stand the climate, but because the jobs were horrible! it also explains the presence of plenny Portuguese people, imported from the tropical Azores.). i think “Borinque” even made it to the Pidgin English lexicon–is that a bastardization? i have a friend who is Puerto Rican/Filipino; just another lovely local mixture…
and talking about how the native fauna of Hawai’i has been destroyed by bad introduction ideas would be a whole other post. lends credence to the idea that PR and Hawai’i are internal colonies of the United States…
Native flora, actually. Native fauna was nearly all wiped out prior to Western contact; whatever was left was already well in decline, and the final blow for most of the last few remaining species of native birds came with 1) the introduction and release of avian malaria and its vectors, and 2) continued habitat loss. (The mongooses do prey on nesting shorebirds & eggs, but so do rats, a pre-contact introduction, but have little to do with the loss of the forest birds, what most folk think of when referring to Hawaii’s native fauna.) The mosquitoes would have come sooner or later with any kind of trade - commercial activity with foreigners not being at all kapu. The other, secondary vectors (eg. released songbirds) are more attributable to persons from North Asian ethnic groups, and can hardly be thought of as some haole plot.
Other than birds, the only other megafauna to speak of are the turtles and the monk seals, both at some risk since post-contact. However, I wouldn’t call it due to US political domination or even tourism, although the latter is perhaps the last nail in a coffin that’s been building quite a while. The seal’s decline is mainly due to loss of prey base and incidental killings by commercial fisheries. The turtle’s early decline was due to overharvest, both of eggs and turtles, and antedates loss of habitat due to tourism by many years. Whether the introduction of better technology for hunting was an evil outside imposition is debatable.
None of this is meant as an apologist’s remarks for tourism, BTW.
Naturally–it’s the trigger fish that happens to be the state fish of Hawaii. I also know that the often-bandied-about “kahuna” means something along the lines of “teacher” or “wise one”, “kapu” means “taboo” or “forbidden”, and that “pahoehoe” refers to cooled lava (a handy fact for Balderdash players).
So, given that I’m an ignorant country boy from Louisiana, do I pass?
