As on most mornings, we started the day out right with a sensible, papaya-based breakfast. Afterwards, we took a quick trip to the dive shop to rent snorkel gear, including the all-important prescription masks. As a PSA — if you are ever going on a snorkeling trip and don’t wear contacts, rent the prescription mask. If you’re getting your snorkel gear from a tour company they might not have prescription masks, but the dive shops (at least in Hawaii) do, and it is so worth it. Using an old pair of glasses with the arms removed also works, but this way is a lot more convenient and surprisingly cheap.
We decided to try out our new gear at the hotel beach, and were rewarded with views of many fish. My favorite was an enormous parrot fish so large that every bite he took out of the reef was accompanied by an audible “chomp”. It’s a good thing that the reef fish don’t mind humans because I would hate to get on the bad side of something with that kind of jaw!
After our morning snorkel, we went to the next official stop of the day, the Ocean Rider Seahorse Farm. If you are like me, you might be wondering, “why would anybody farm seahorses?” The answer is that these seahorses are farmed for the pet trade. In the past, many wild seahorses were caught for home aquariums, contributing to their status as a threatened species, but wild seahorses don’t even survive in captivity — they refuse to eat anything other than live mysis shrimp, and are monogamous fish that will pine away when separated from their partners.
Ocean Rider specializes in breeding seahorses that are habituated to domestic life. First, they found a seahorse willing to eat dead shrimp and had the seahorse, Mikey, move tank to tank, demonstrating this to other seahorses (seahorses will apparently learn eating habits from observing their friends) and breeding the seahorses that would eat the dead shrimp. They also created the world’s first polyamorous seahorses, by reducing the social necessity of seahorse marriage and creating OK Cupid accounts for all the seahorses. (Actually they just put the seahorses in densely populated mixed-sex groups, so that they would learn that if things weren’t going well with their partner, that there are “other fish in the sea”.) Seahorses are still highly social, so Ocean Rider will only sell them in pairs, but they don’t have to be pairs of One True Seahorse Love. Having conquered the seahorse frontier, Ocean Rider is now trying to accomplish the same thing for sea dragons.
We (where “we” = the two of us, a couple of random tourists, and what appeared to be the entire Duke University undergraduate aquaculture program) got to see a number of seahorses, including tiny day-old fry. In the wild, about .1% of fry survive to adulthood. At Ocean Rider, about 50% do. We also learned that seahorses are very efficient at reproduction — male seahorses are pregnant about 100% of the time. Finally, we even got to hold a seahorse! They are not really shy around people at all.
At the end of the tour, we learned that while the wild seahorse population was previously decimated as a result of the pet trade (at a clip of over 1 million seahorses a year taken from the ocean, which is now down to just 30,000), the new threat is people drinking seahorse tea for medicinal purposes. I didn’t ask if they were planning on turning their farmed seahorses into tea - they seemed too attached to them to even ask.
The Ocean Rider gift shop is also the single most concentrated collection of seahorse branded paraphernalia in the known world. We picked up a seahorse aloha shirt for the collection.
Our next stop was the Greenwell Farms coffee plant to take the tour. Maybe it was that our tour guide had a very weird presentation style, or maybe it was that neither of us like coffee, but the tour was sub-amazing. However, we did learn a few fascinating facts: the first is that at one point Hawaii was the home of the second largest cattle ranch in the US. The second fascinating fact is that Greenwell hires randos as day labor to pick coffee beans and will pay you by the pound, just like the hops pickers Orwell described in A Clergyman’s Daughter. I really had no idea this kind of super casual agricultural labor still existed in the developed world. (The Hawaii Vanilla Company described doing something similar, as well as also using volunteer labor and student labor from orchid farmers and agriculture students.) I guess the labor market in Hawaii is not big enough for the harvesting to be done by a full-time seasonal workforce you see in California’s fruit picking industry. It also seems like many people on the Big Island have the kind of irregularly-scheduled tourism industry job that allows time for farm labor between tours.
Anyway, the guide told us that by hand-picking only the ripe fruit, the farm can increase its quality over farms that machine pick the entire tree. I have got to imagine that it is possible to machine-sort coffee berries by color (and thus by ripeness), but maybe if you are picking the entire tree it’s not cost effective to throw out the unripe berries. I was also surprised to see that even though the coffee trees we were viewing were over 100 years old, they were tiny — apparently, coffee trees are aggressively pruned and sheared to stay under 8 feet high for easier picking.
We also saw this neat chameleon in the trees nearby the farm:
The tour concluded with our guide explaining that Greenwell Farms coffee should not be drunk with sugar and cream because it is so good that it doesn’t need it. (There is even a honey tasting set up near the coffee tasting, but with strict instructions that under absolutely no circumstances should you put the honey in the coffee.) We tried a number of flavors of the coffee black, as instructed, and our conclusion was: coffee tastes really gross without sugar or cream. Also, to an untrained palate, it’s like red wine: it all tastes the same.
Our last trip of the day was to Kona harbor, to do a night dive with the manta rays. Manta rays are filter feeders with enormous mouths and teeny throats. They feed by opening their mouths and swimming in a loop, flipping upside-down at the top of it and swimming right-side up at the bottom. The mantas feed on plankton in the evening — the dive companies put bright lights shining up at the bottom of the ocean. These lights attract plankton, which attract mantas, which attract snorkelers, in a great symbiotic relationship. The mantas are super cool and swam right under us, close enough to touch (although touching of mantas is VERBOTEN). Our guides were also pretty great, and big sci-fi fans who played the Star Wars theme from the boat speakers.
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