Spring Guest Presenter Highlight

Mālaʻai is proud to bring guest speakers who can provide our students with knowledge from many different areas of study. One speaker this quarter was an 8th grader from Hawaii Preparatory Academy who is pioneering a new way to use invasive fish species. Here is a little blurb from our guest speaker Luke!

“My name is Luke Vincent and I am an 8th grader at HPA. Every 8th grader, designs a capstone project that is geared towards helping the community, any community you chose. For me, I love to go fishing and wanted to incorporate fishing or the ocean into my project. As I brainstormed more and more I eventually figured out what I wanted to do. I settled on catching invasive fish and turning that fish into FAA or Fish Amino Acid. FAA is a fish fertilizer that can be used in gardens to help plants receive a great abundance of nutrients. The main invasive fish that I targeted were the invasive Tilapia and Mexican Mollies, although there are many other invasive fish like Ta’ape, Toau, and Roi that affect our reef ecosystems. The reason I used Tilapia was because they are negatively impacting our native anchialine ponds at Kiholo. The Tilapia’s presence means that the endemic ‘ōpaeʻula arenʻt there. These small red shrimp are considered keystone species in these ponds and their population needs to return to maintain a healthy ecosystem. During my project, I went fishing in the Kiholo ponds twice, collected data for Hui Aloha Kiholo, learned how to make FAA with my garden teacher, and then I shared my experience and FAA recipe with Waimea Middle School."

Fish Amino Acids are an excellent way to provide nutrients to your garden plants because it makes some critical nutrients more available for the plants to absorb.