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Waterfall climbing shrimp !

October 15, 2009
Native 'Opae kala'ole are great climbers which has helped them to survive.

Native 'Opae kala'ole are great climbers which has helped them to survive.

Significant populations of native Hawaiian shrimp were identified in Palikea stream in Haleakala National Park and Waikolu Stream in Kalaupapa National Historical Park. Invasive Tahitian prawns dominate the lower reaches of these streams and native Hawaiian shrimp are almost non-existent there. The native shrimp, however, can climb up waterfalls and other barriers that block the invasive and aggressive Tahitian prawns. The range of many native shrimp is now primarily restricted to the upper reaches of larger streams where there is enough flow to support habitat. Less rainfall and lower stream flow projected with climate change in Hawaii could further reduce native shrimp habitat in the future.

Invasive Tahitian prawn

Invasive Tahitian prawn

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