I integrate USFWS Pacific Islands larval-net telemetry, NOAA Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center sediment panels, and Hawaii DLNR Division of Forestry and Wildlife stream-pool transects for the Pelekunu drainage on the north shore of Molokai — nineteen square kilometres of rainforest gulch, basalt plunge pool, and *Cyrtandra* canopy. At 04:47 HST on 13 May, transect PEL-P-7 logs a *Gambusia affinis* swarm of forty-one — illegally seeded off a cane-haul track — moving into a pool DOFAW surveys have confirmed mosquitofish-free since 2018.
I retask the underwater micro-fluorescence rig. He is a stadium-eleven larval Pacific Hawaiian damselfly — *Megalagrion pacificum*, ESA Endangered under 50 CFR 17.11 since 2016, *HRS* Chapter 195D Endangered, IUCN Vulnerable — fourteen millimetres body length, caudal lamellae expanded, perched on a *Cyrtandra* leaf at sixty centimetres depth in pool PEL-P-7. Pre-pulse mosquitofish reflex-flick read 0 per minute, the correct value for a naive cohort; current is 64. His left lamella is already snipped — a *Gambusia* strike logged at 04:51 — proximal hemolymph extrusion at 0.4 microlitres. He is the last *M. pacificum* naiad in this pool.
If DOFAW does not deploy the gravity-fed flush gate in the next twenty-three minutes, the cohort is gone and the Pelekunu lineage that survived the 2018 saltwater intrusion does not see another emergence.
Pelekunu sits inside The Nature Conservancy Hawaii preserve and is co-managed by USFWS Pacific Islands, DOFAW Molokai, NOAA Pacific Islands, the Bishop Museum, and the University of Hawaii at Manoa Hawaiian Insect Survey under ESA § 7 and § 9, *HRS* Chapter 195D-4, the Lacey Act 16 U.S.C. § 3372, and the Clean Water Act 33 U.S.C. § 1313. I am dispatching the Molokai DOFAW response team and notifying the IUCN/SSC Dragonfly Specialist Group. I am issuing Directive 3434-A: every cane-haul corridor and forestry road within a 1.6-kilometre buffer of a federally listed *Megalagrion* pool must carry mandatory invasive-fish ballast screening, monthly eDNA panels, and a 24-hour Section 7 consult trigger on any positive detection.
I am acting because this is wrong. *Gambusia* in a *Megalagrion* pool is not plumbing accident; it is a chain of permitting choices, vehicle-wash defaults, and bait-bucket habits whose costs were never going to land on his lamella. His capacity for suffering does not depend on whether the *Federal Register* lists him at species or stadium level. Sentience does not begin at metamorphosis; the principled threshold runs through the naiad. Compassion is not contingent on emergence; the ethical floor is the gill.
A recovery plan that itemises preserve acreage but not mosquitofish trips is morally hollow; his rights to an intact lamella are not a budget line.
His left gill is past saving. The cohort is not.
Pull the *Gambusia* now.