Update and a little history

This email is a doozy. Sorry it took me so long and also please forgive any typing errors, I had a hard time figuring out which of my devices will actually connect to the wifi with a strong enough connection to send an email. My laptop is useless for wifi and my phone is too small to type an email of this length. So I ended up using my tablet but that presents it's own challenges.

I have only been able to type up the first week of July but I've been doing some really cool research on the history of Johnston as a refuge and have hopefully given you some cool details on some of the work we are doing here. I'll continue to do this as we go!

JA Backstory -

Johnston Atoll is a part of the Line Islands archipelago. It is roughly 700 miles from Hawaii and is one of the most remote islands in the world, being the only landmass in 820,000 square miles. It was used by the US military and was built up and enlarged via dredging in the 40's and is shaped largely like an aircraft carrier. 

In a narrative report I found in our library Johnston had ~1000 inhabitants in 1987 and ~1200 inhabitants in 1994. The Dept. Of Defense used Johnston for a nuclear defense instillation and the army stored chemical munitions. There were ton containers, rockets, projectiles, bombs, and mines with nerve agents and mustard gas. Ironically the Pacific Remote Islands National Wildlife Refugees was established by Coolidge in 1926 and still, by the 60s, three failed nuclear tests and agent orange had contaminated multiple acres of "refuge and breeding ground for native birds". This little island is classified as a "high priority area for corrective action relating to contaminant issues." Not to worry, the clean up efforts immediately after an explosion consisted simply of putting the scattered plutonium behind a fence for safe keeping! They buried their asbestos and burned their laboratory wastes, pesticides, and oil from transformers daily, if they didn't get dumped in the ocean.

In 1987, at the time the report I have been reading, the Army and the Defense Nuclear Agency employed a single biologist (the first biologist since 1960) to live on Johnston, maintain the refuge and deal with the contaminants of the island, all the while educating the civilian and military inhabitants because, of course, there were many human-wildlife conflicts to tackle. In reading this report I am flabbergasted that even the last building to be constructed on Johnston, which was for mitigating contaminants and helping the island recover, had severe impacts on the ecology. Apparently the contractors were washing their cement trucks into the ocean, running over nests, and planning on running water lines through the last bit of undisturbed nesting area. Luckily our biologist friend stopped them!

In 2010 CAST, the Crazy Ant Strike Team was created to address the invasive and highly destructive Yellow Crazy Ant.  YCA are capable of creating "super colonies" by spreading out their nests and queens. Their major claim to fame, the reason CAST was created, has to do with their ability to spray formic acid and how that acid can blind animals, most importantly birds, that blunder into a large number of them.