Gold Dust Day Gecko

Beth and I are going to a white elephant gift exchange tomorrow with her coworkers.   Oh man, you better hope you get my present.  I could barely keep myself from taking it out of the box and playing with it last night. 

As promised:
The gecko I pictured back in "Back in business!" was misidentified.  It is actually a gold dust day gecko.  What a looker!  These guys are really cool looking, and all over the place, too.

As I'm not so hot with the ol picture machine, I'm going to continue to blatantly steal images from elsewhere on the web. I'll work on my citations. promise. this is from here.

These buggers are diurnal, or active during the day.  We see them sunning themselves on our stair railings and plant leaves all the time.  We're glad to have found them, becuase apparently, geckos mean good luck to some Hawaiians.  For us, the fact that they eat bugs is lucky enough.


They don't really like to be looked at, though.  When they catch you staring for too long or from too close, they use their amazing little gecko toes to scamper around to the underside of whatever they are laying on.  Geckos are able to walk on the underside of leaves, up walls, and on windows thanks to these amazing little gecko toes, which have around a million hairs on each toe pad.  I guess the tiny amount of friction, compounded over millions of hairs, is enough to hold the buggers up! Check out this website for more on geckos. They do a more comprehensive page on these guys.

The gold dust day gecko is a species introduced from Madagascar, but apparently only common in the "suburban" areas of Hawaii, Maui, and Oahu.  So maybe it's not as damaging to Hawaiian ecology as many of the other introduced species.
Do any bit of reading about plants and animals in Hawaii, and you will see what a comprehensive impact introduced species have had on the endemic species that evolved on these tranquil little islands. More on that later.

Beach!

Yesterday I went to a beautiful beach with some of Beth's coworkers (she was working...)

Guess who forgot their camera!  I do have to say that the Cellana folks are all really friendly.  Most are about our age, very fun and welcoming.  It is a good community to fall into.

bicycle commuter!

This morning, Beth and I skipped sunrise at Honul's beach to ride our bikes out to Cellana.  Once we snuck out of town, avoiding the major streets, we got up onto Queen Kahumanu Highway, and it was a quick little ride along the relatively flat road.  There is a very wide shoulder, but it is a little scary riding next to the 50 mph traffic. It was a quick 40 minute ride, door to door.  Little did we realize that our journey was eased, like so many before us, by strong SE trade winds!  I'm sure that by the time she has to ride home, the wind will have switched to her favor... grumble grumble.

I stopped by Wawaloli Beach Park on the way home.  It is situated on the same 1801 lava flow as the airport and Cellana, and has lots of rocky shoreline.  A little reminiscent of the North Shore of Lake Superior.  Only a little.  The rocks are both basalt, yes, but they are way younger and more rugged here.  Also, the waves are a lot bigger.  Pretty impressive to this flatlander.  I was impressed with the power and size of the waves and the amount of water they pushed up onto the rocks.

The big peach rock in the middle is covered by about 6 feet more water in the bottom picture than the top!  (sorry no scale).

One place, the waves would slam into the porous, fissured rock, and force air and water through the spaces.  The rocks would hiss and sputter with each wave crest.  Almost like they were alive.  It was very cool.  I was spooked the first time I heard it, until I figured out what was going on.  I even saw one little geyser that would shoot 3 feet in the air! neat.

Here is some of the pahoehoe (ropey lava) I saw.  groovy.

 Rainbow! Wavebow?

 The lil geyser.  Ok, maybe not 3 feet.

One of the funny parts about walking on the rocks was that the little rock crabs would go scurrying away like crazy, usually before I even saw them.  Often with so much vigor that they would fling themselves off the 6' cliffs and go spinning into the sea.  I suppose it is so they wouldn't end up like this:

Here is a Honul's Beach crab, so you can see what the living ones look like: well camouflaged.

sunrise at Ali'i cove!

Nice sunrise this morning.  This place is called Houl's Beach, just minutes from Cellana's condo.

Here is a picture of the condo complex from Ali'i Drive (map).

On the map, you can see Honul's beach in between the vacation rentals and the clairvoyant center. Kind of a metaphor for my life? Anyway, the condo is in the wedge of undeveloped (at photo time) land just inland of the clairvoyant center.  Ali'i is the Hawaiian word for the historic noble class, believed to have had divine origins!

Our unit is on the ground floor, facing the pool, which in this picture is behind the hedge. 

You can see Mt Hoalalai in the background of this picture.

There it is on the map the Easternmost mountain on the big island.
Hualalai is considered dormant, but is responsible for the 1801 flow that the Kona Airport is on.  It has also been a part of 3 seismic/eruptive events since then, most recently in 1929.  It is the 3rd most active Hawaiian volcano, after Kilauea and  Manu Loa.  Doesn't sound dormant to me! Here is a good Wikipedia page on Hualalai.

But all the really active lava flows, the ones famous for flowing continuously into the ocean, are on the coast south of Kilauea.  There is a lot of cool Volcanology here.  More to come to be sure.  But while this picture is here, check out Lo'ihi, in the ocean south of Kilauea.  It is currently the volcano most directly over the hot spot and will be the next volcanic Hawaiian island.    Here's a graphic illustrating the idea:  see how the hot spot is stationary and the Pacific plate moves NW, creating the island chain?  Good.