Biology of Coral Reefs in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands

The Northwestern Hawaiian Islands (NWHI ) represent the northern three-quarters of the Hawaiian Archipelago. This part of the Hawaiian chain stretches across 2,000 km of the North Pacific between 23 and 29 degrees north latitude and consists of nine major islets, coral islands and/or atolls. Numerous reefs, submerged banks and seamounts also exist between and around the main islands. Together with the Main Hawaiian Islands (MHI), the Hawaiian Archipelago is the longest, oldest and best studied archipelago on earth. The NWHI are also considered the most isolated and pristine group of coral reef ecosystems in the world (Figs. 14.1, 14.2).

The NWHI were first discovered and explored by the ancient Hawaiians during pre-historic time before European contact. Numerous archaeological remains on Nihoa and Necker islands demonstrate that both islands were inhabited by early Hawaiians but exactly when, and for how long, is unknown. References to the islands further west in the archipelago also exist in early Hawaiian chants and legends. When the Kingdom of Hawaii was overthrown by the US Government in 1893, the NWHI (except Midway) were included within the new provisional government that immediately was established and renamed the Republic of Hawaii. In 1898, the US Congress passed a resolution to annex the Republic of Hawaii as a Territory. A final step in the political history of the NWHI was inclusion into the Union as a State bestowed by the US Congress in 1959 and approved by a Plebiscite held in Hawaii that same year (Atlas of Hawaii 1998). Midway Atoll was actually claimed separately and much earlier by the US Government in 1859 by a US Captain, N.C. Brooks, under the authority granted to him by the Guano Act of 1856. Midway is therefore the only island in the NWHI that does not actually belong to the State of Hawaii per se (Rauzon 2001).