I'd like to preface this threat by stating that I am first and foremost praying for the people affected by the Kilauea volcano's eruption.
With that being said, keeping in the theme of this forum, I would like to start a conversation about the Opae Ula's natural habitat and the effects of volcanic eruptions on their populations and evolutionary adaptations. I found this source from Auburn University detailing the demographic history of H. Rubra https://www.auburn.edu/~santosr/pdf/San ... olEcol.pdf
I found the following excerpt in this source detailing the effects of volcanic eruption on one population of Opae Ula. Do you think that we will see changes in the Opae Ula population after this most recent catastrophe? In what ways, if any, does this benefit Opae Ulas in the wild? Does anyone have any other articles or links that they'd like to share regarding Opae Ulas and natural disasters? I wonder if, since Anchialine Pools connect underground, the Opae Ulas "sense" the volcanic activity and flee before true danger. Do volcanic eruptions have the potential to create new pools?
Am I overthinking all of this?
Thank you 
Volcanic episodes, and the
impact these events have on the hypogeal environment,
also appear to have influenced the demography of H. rubra
on the island. For instance, the population from Isaac Hale
(i.e. IH) possesses the signal of a strong bottleneck and
subsequent expansion, as evident by the largest negative
Tajima’s D and Fu’s FS values encountered in the study
(Table 1). Coincidently, this H. rubra population is from an
anchialine pond ∼5 km south of the primary eruption site
for the 1960 Kapoho episode, which is considered the third
largest eruption of Kilauea volcano in the 20th century. On
the first day of the episode (13 January 1960), several anchialine
ponds adjacent to the eruption site were covered by
magma and more than 11 h of powerful blasts occurred as
the hypogeal water system of the area flashed to steam
(http://hvo.wr.usgs.gov/kilauea/history/1960Jan13/). The
steam blasts ended within 24 h, suggesting the water
reservoirs of the immediate hypogeal region were exhausted
during that period. In areas where water was not blasted to
steam, the hypogeal system would have experienced a
substantial, and inhospitable, increase in temperature. As
testimony to this, ocean temperature increased from 22 °C
to 39 °C at a site 300 m offshore from the Kapoho area on
15 January 1960 (http://hvo.wr.usgs.gov/kilauea/history/
1960Jan13/). The 1960 Kapoho episode, which spanned
36 days and erupted a volume of magma conservatively
estimated at 122 million cubic metres, represents just a
single event in Kilauea’s history. An additional 61 eruptions
of Kilauea have been recorded in the past 200 years
(http://hvo.wr.usgs.gov/kilauea/history/) while two
other volcanoes on the island, Mauna Loa and Mauna
Kea, have also been highly active over the last 10 000 years
(Lockwood 1995). Volcanic events like those described
above have probably impacted the hypogeal water
systems of Hawaii (and by extension, the H. rubra that
reside within them) on numerous occasions, leading to
cycles of population contraction and expansion in these
shrimp. It is proposed that such events, on a scale of tens
of thousands of years, could be responsible for the
observed demography of H. rubra on Hawaii. Given the
magnitude and frequency of these types of events, it
should not be surprising that volcanism can significantly
impact the demographic history of an organism (sensu
Vandergast et al. 2004), including those occupying
anchialine habitats on geologically active landmasses.
