This first photo is a masters student in the lab (background is a lab hopeful, he will take his Hokudai entrance exam in January and if successful will join the lab).
The Msc student is identifying the functional groups (grazers, producers, predators etc) of species on the rock in front of him and calling out the data to the person behind him. The plot that he is collecting data from is a “successional plot” that had all of the creatures removed from that bit of rock 3 years ago, and the community that has moved in to replace it has been surveyed by this lab three times per year ever since. They use these data to test theories about community change over time using mathematical and statistical modelling.This next photo shows a PhD student in the lab. He is measuring the temperature of the rock surface as part of the environmental monitoring portion of the survey.
In his right hand you can see the top end of the thermometer. This student was very quiet around me for the first couple of weeks that I was here, but has since warmed up considerably and his English is very good. During our last stint in the field, he patiently taught me some common Kanji characters and tested me at every meal on my meal appropriate Japanese words (things like “let's eat” and “thanks for dinner”).This last photo is another MSc student. In this photo he is hiding in a hollow under a rock assembling the hand torches that we used to burn the rock surfaces.
As you can tell from the photo, it was a very wet dark night for us. This student has also been an interesting personality and has kept his distance from me for the first while. His labmates have told me that he has been especially nervous about talking to me because he is insecure about his spoken English (incidentally his written English far exceeds that of his sensei (=supervisor)). With that in mind, I made sure that I forced him to talk with me while we were in Akkeshi and even asked him to take me to the store one day. That gave me a chance to ask him all sorts of silly questions about vegetables that I don't know the name of and fish that I didn't recognize. He has relaxed a little around me since then and even made a special effort to take me to the Akkeshi fish market and waited patiently while I took photos of the fish and shellfish in the tanks.The countdown to Shawn's arrival is now 7 days. I am very much looking forward to seeing him. And my boss has told me that one of the guys can't make it to the third field trip (scheduled for 1 week after Shawn arrives) so we can take Shawn to the field with us. Now, I will just have to see if we can find hip waders in a shoe size large enough to fit him!
