Coconut Trees in a Fight For Their Lives pg.3
The Kaua’i Farm Bureau has been alerted to the spreading disease, and fliers also have been circulated to educate the public, he said. But more palm trees will die on Kaua’i because there is no attempt yet to pull in the reins on the disease, Visintainer said. The two largest remaining coconut groves remaining on Kaua’i could be threatened, according to Kaua’i Farm Bureau. One is located at the old Coco Palms Hotel, the island’s flagship hotel of the 1950s. The grove trees are old, and to replace those when they die, younger ones were planted along side the older ones.
The other grove is located on a parcel on the mountainside of Kuhio Highway in Waipouli. More than 100 years go, the grove produced copra (coconut meat) for export. The industry fade because it became cheaper to grow coconut elsewhere in the world. Visintainer said he is working with Kaua’i Nursery & Landscaping, the largest landscaping company on the island, the Kaua’i Farm Bureau and the UH Agricultural Experimental Station to begin to look at ways to check the spread of the fungus.
Visintainer said his company has treated trees on Maui for the past year and has had an 80 percent success rate. Trees at 10 hotels, including the Ritz Carlton, Maui Prince and the Embassy Vacation Resorts, condominiums, golf courses and private homes have been treated with positive results, he said. “Maui is really doing well,” he said, adding his company hopes to start similar treatment programs on other islands.
In a test on Maui that involved 70 trees, 20 of the trees were injected with the nutrient, resulting in one casualty because the tree had already been infected. The other 50 trees were not treated, and 14 have died so far, said Visintainer. The application of the nutrients will augment any methods that are found that will either check or kill the fungus, Visintainer said. Research at the UH facility in Wailua in the early 1980s showed that protection from the fungus could be achieved by injecting a fungicide or fertilizer into the tree trunk. But final results couldn’t be obtained because Hurricane Iniki in 1992 destroyed the experiment. At this time, injecting any fungicide into a coconut tree as part of a treatment program is prohibited by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
