We were a quarter-mile offshore of Hickam Air Force Base on a day so still, the ocean was a pane of unbroken glass that stretched from Diamond Head to the Waianae Range. The tide was at an extreme low, exposing reef flats that, on most days, rarely breached the surface. Despite our distance from shore, the water did not reach our knees.
We were bent over like large, odd wading birds, contentedly exploring the nooks and crannies of the reef. Painted fish darted away at our approach, and moray eels watched us warily from their reef hideaways.
We had drifted apart, but a call that echoed across the water brought us all suddenly upright and wading quickly toward the one who had summoned us. We knew a call meant something out of the ordinary, perhaps a small blacktip shark gliding through one of the shallow reef valleys or a turtle climbing ponderously over the coral and, once, a ghostly box jellyfish pulsing through the water, causing us to back carefully away.
We arrived nearly simultaneously at a shallow sand flat where five mangrove trees had plunged their roots deep into the reef and thrived. They had been there longer than any of us could remember, a singularly bizarre oasis that was otherwise barren of vegetation. And there we found a new and unexpected sight: Exposed in the palm of the one who had summoned us was a large and resplendent humpback cowry (cypraea mauritiana).
The one who made the unexpected discovery revealed where she had found it, clenched firmly to a mangrove root, inches below the surface. Her discovery launched an enthusiastic search of the neighboring mangroves, a search that turned up three more specimens - which we left untouched - before we were satisfied we had found them all. We were puzzled. Humpbacks, also called mourning cowries, are usually found along those hostile stretches of coastline where waves crash heavily onto the black rocks that often line Hawaii’s shores; they are not supposed to be found in a mangrove sand flat. Realizing we had uncovered an oddity of nature, we returned the first humpback to its welcoming tangle of mangrove roots and left it with an admonition to “hide well,” as we knew its fate if a collector’s eyes were to fall upon it.
The humpbacks did hide well. Whenever an extreme low tide lured us back to the reef, we were always quick to check on our intrepid colony of humpbacks . . . and they were always there, clinging, as before, to the dark tangle of roots that anchored the mangroves to the reef. They became our “little colony that should not exist,” and we were always thrilled when a sharp-eyed member of our group would spot the first one
And then, one day, a truck arrived at the edge of the ocean and spilled out its contents of hard-hatted young men, who immediately proceeded to post signs stating “Keep Out. Mangrove Removal in Progress.” A few weeks passed, the trucks left, the signs were removed, and the mangroves that had once offered shelter and promise to an array of marine life had been uprooted and left in a bleak, whitening pile along the shore. When the tide again pulled away, a long, sad search revealed that our lost colony of humpbacks had disappeared forever.
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