Every year, Brian Hirata, a Culinary Arts professor at Hawai‘i Community College, gives his students a pop quiz on identifying local fish. 

Anya Tagawa fondly recalls the most thrilling moments of her career in natural resource conservation, like rappelling into lava tubes to access rare plants that had thrived in the shelter of the tube. Or blazing trails and flying by helicopter to far-flung places in Kohala to search for rare plants. 

 “It’s an exciting field,” Tagawa said recently. “It’s been an exciting life, for sure.”