After months of searching, a group of middle schoolers from Kanu o ka ʻĀina New Century Public Charter School had finally found their prize: a bunch of tiny brown snails.
Over the course of the school year, Kanu o ka ʻĀina teacher Kiane Prietto had been leading her students on weekly field surveys across Hawaiʻi Island to catalog both invasive and endemic snails.
"All we found were invasive species at every single site," Prietto said, until she took them on a field trip near the top of Maunakea in March.
As they first looked around at the rocky landscape, Prietto said her students weren't optimistic. But soon they started to find shells among the rocks, and then — at long last — live specimens of Succinea konaensis, a native snail that lives only on Hawaiʻi Island and is rarely recorded.
Prietto recalls her middle schoolers, who were also joined on the trip by Keaʻau High School students, racing from one side of the puʻu to the other.
"And they would scream from the other side of the puʻu, 'We found snails!'" she said. "That was the most excited I've ever seen any group of middle school and high school students."
It was a day of triumph for Prietto and her students. But the program that made it all possible may be going away.
Federal science education funding under threat
Prietto's own admiration of snails is evident, and it's earned her a bit of a reputation.
"My neighbors, they get asked if they live next to the snail lady," she said. "And I think that's hilarious."
But for a long time, snails weren’t really on Prietto's radar.
That changed when she was selected to participate in the federally funded BIORETS program at the Bishop Museum last summer.
During a seven-week intensive course led by malacologists Kenneth Hayes and Norine Yeung, Prietto learned about — and fell in love with — native land snails.
Through BIORETS, she designed a new curriculum all about biodiversity with a big focus on kāhuli, or endemic snails.
Field surveys were one of the core components of Prietto's revised curriculum.
Hayes said the data collected by Prietto's students over the course of the year demonstrates that students can make valuable contributions to the scientific record.
"We've been championing this idea that science isn't this thing that's done by a small handful of people that managed to get Ph.D.s and graduate degrees," he said. "Science is a way of seeing the world, and everyone can be taught to see the world as a scientist."
Hayes believes the BIORETS program has the power to transform how science is taught in Hawaiʻi schools.
"We need to take advantage of the fact that we live in one of the biodiversity capitals of the world," he said.
But BIORETS has an uncertain future. In February, Hayes was informed that the National Science Foundation was discontinuing the program because it doesn't match the priorities of the Trump administration.
So far, Hayes has still been able to draw down money from their $600,000 NSF award. He hopes once that money runs out, the state or a private donor will step up to keep BIORETS going in Hawaiʻi.
Prietto, meanwhile, is coming up with creative ways to pay for her field trips. In May, she and her students launched a lei stand at the Surf Camp store in Waimea.
"I have students from Kohala to Kona that are making lei based off what they have available. We strive to do non-native species, because they're really hardy, and it's just good to perpetuate the use of removing invasive flowers," she said.
Prietto's students spent months looking for their first native snail. She's confident that they will approach any new challenge with the same persistence.
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