Nishihara Laboratory

Today is the second day of our field lab for the third year students. Usually, it's held on Tuesday, but we were rained out. So, we had to use our backup day. There is one more field lab, then it's two days In the PC lab, to do some stats with R. We get them to throw around a quadrat about 40 times or so, to get counts of sea urchins and starfish and coverage estimates of seagrass and sargassum. The students seem to enjoy the field portion od the lab... Not too sure about R though.

Another day in the field.

最近日本では、いい R の本が増えている。おかげで、センターの学生らもスキルアップができている。 とくに、R言語逆引きハンドブックとRフラフィックスはお勧めです。

There is a lab at ECSER that interested in how floating rafts of seaweeds attract juvenile fish. Today, we went to help them collect some Sargassum horneri for their experiments. They plan to create a raft, with a load of cameras and other sensors, to see what species of fish are attracted to it. We went to an area called Benten-Shirahama, which has a rich flora of seaweeds. In fact, there are at least 5 species of Sargassum, growing in large beds. This is rather unusual, since a lot of the coastal areas in Nagasaki has lost much of this flora. My lab was responsible for collecting the Sargassum horneri , and their lab was given the task of transporting it back to shore. You can barely see them in the photo, but they are in two kayaks full of Sargassum. Another view from the wharf.

Ms. Koga has setup her flow-chamber experiment, and doing a practice run. She's placed about 2 kg wet-weight or so of Sargassum horneri  into one chamber, with a pair of ProODOs (YSI, Inc.) to monitor the dissolved oxygen and temperature. A better look at one of the ProODOs. All setup and ready for a trial run.

This year, a student from Prof. Matsuoka's lab will join my lab as a PhD student. Prof. Matsuoka, who is a dinoflagellate specialist, not to mention a paleontologist, retired and asked if I was willing to pick Hinode up as a student. I was rather skeptical at first since I didn't want anything to do with microalgae, but Hinode was willing to work on benthic diatoms and microalgae within the seagrass beds so why not. It is "tradition" that the first time a new member of our lab goes on their first field trip, it will rain. And true to tradition it rained on his first time with us. I think this was in December of last year. You can see Hinode in the blue rain jacket, behind me pulling our old version of the surface buoy, which incidentally flipped over and destroyed the instruments the following day due to terrible weather. Lost 200,000 yen worth of equipment. I like rain, so this didn't bother me too much, since I'm wet anyways, but apparently the g...

My first graduate student, completed his masters and left the lab in March. He works for a big construction / environmental assessment company now, and is in Tokyo. Anyways, we went out for one of the last surveys of the season in Omura Bay. I don't really remember but I think the water was about 8 degrees C. It not that bad, as long as the sun is shining and the wind is not blowing. Here you can see our surface buoy with the anemometer and the PAR sensor. Both of which are from Onset. Kimura is using a Castaway CTD from YSI to take salinity and temperature measurements. We like the Castaway, because of its ease of use and the fact that it will take write some GPS information to the data recording. Not to mention the fact that we can see the results immediately in the field. The only problem is that periodically it is difficult to "wake up" the instrument. Sometimes it fails to turn on. But after a few minutes fiddling with it, then it will turn on. I haven't bot...

The screen grab says it all.

Just this past March, we had a chance to go to Kagoshima to do some field work in a long channel behind the sea wall along the coast of Kagoshima Bay. During the winter to late spring, the channel is home a wide variety of macrophytes, especially seagrass ( Zostera marina ). Since it is behind a seawall, there are almost no waves and provides a safe environment to practice setting up and deploying the equipment. With the help of Dr. Terada's lab (Kagoshima University), we were able to deploy our instruments and retrieve them after a week. The Zostera bed is a bit patchy. We placed some dataloggers for light and dissolved oxygen. You can see the surface buoy where we have an anemometer and an additional light logger.

So the building was incomplete the last time I updated this blog. There were a lot of reasons why this was so, but in the end, Facilities agreed to a large numbers of our requests. In particular, putting a few doors on  the entrance to the restrooms and a larger driveway for the truck. But the building is still pink and still looks like a women's health clinic.