Hey Everyone, welcome from Hana, Maui, Hawaii.
 

After some technical issues, we are starting up our blog from Hawaii.  This is our second field season, after our first foray to Kauai and Oahu, this winter we are visiting Maui and the Big Island.  Since the summer we have been looking at algae from our summer collections (over 250 samples), and the preliminary reports are that we are finding many new species, and many new records for Hawaii.

Beautiful first night on Maui.
 
On this leg of our trip are Jeff and Melissa from John Carroll University, Amy and Jessica from UH and Carrie and I from CU.  While our Summer trip was a "wet, dry season" right now we are experiencing a "dry, wet season".  A first trip to Poli Poli Springs found most sites dry (there is no springs at this site, by the way, but, as an aside, there are lots of Eucalyptus and even redwoods here; with the dust and these elements of the vegetation it felt, and smelled, more like California than Hawaii).  The hot day was soothed by some non-dairy coconut-based ice cream.
 

local-made ice cream--yum
 
We then headed off along the Hana Highway, with an all day collecting trip on yesterday.  Things were much wetter, with many waterfalls and streams.  Wet walls, waterfalls and streams were the focus of our attention.  After a delicious meal prepared by Jeff, we worked until midnight on the 90+ (!) samples taken, making observations on the algae with the microscopes we brought.
 
Today, we collected beyond Hana, where the road is amazingly rugged and narrow, the sites of the ocean and shoreline amazing (a bad combination, actually), and the algae plentiful at some sites (and absent from some dried out sites).  As I write we are back at the 'scopes, making sure we have made good collections and processing them a bit so that our work back in our labs is reduced--making the best of our time.
 

View from the car(!) on our collecting trip today

Folks processing samples after today's field work.