Lab meeting on May 27th, 2009

1. Tanks Keeper & Room cleaning: MH

2. Progress Report: CA, YM

3. JR is planning a two-day one-night trip in Oku/Hedo this weekend.

4. University is ordering us not to go to the place where there is Influenza. ex.. Fukuoka, Osaka
Otherwise you will be confined to your house for ten days after your trip.

5. We have our home page now. But It's quite new and still under construction. If you are interested, please check it out! http://web.me.com/miseryukyu/


By yuka

pic: Upside-down jellyfish in Ishigaki, Okinawa

Omiyage

Kato-san from Suda-sensei's lab gave our lab some omiyage (souvenirs) to say thanks for some English editing JDR did on a manuscript of hers. So, if you look in the student room fridge, there is a bottle of tankan juice from Nago!

Thanks!

Homepage up!

Our homepage is up and running:

http://web.me.com/miseryukyu/

Check it out. We will slowly add pages for each member.

cheers,

JDR

Lab meeting on May 20th, 2009

1. Tanks keeper this week: YI

2. Progress reports: YI & TF

3. Trip to Guam has been cancelled :< class="midashi">for alternate plan...

4. Please fill in the questionnaire of library, or biological journals which we need will be cut off.

5. We can buy things at 100-yen shops by lab budget.

6. Don't forget to lock doors!

A happy rainy season!

by YI

Until proven otherwise...

HIS Chatan sucks very bad. Refusing to refund the majority of our money despite the university ordering us to not go. Shame on companies like this for attempting to make money off of people's problems. They have lost my respect (which is still hopefully a big deal in Japan).

So, note to all you travelers out there. Do not patronize HIS if there is any chance you will be in an "unorthodox" situation. They are so tight with money they could make diamonds with coals.

Booo....

Guam cancelled

In a rather drastic measure, Ryudai is prohibiting all overseas to travel to all foreign countries as a result of the H1N1 in Kobe and Osaka. I guess better safe than sorry, but this seems a bit overdone. I imagine in a week or two things will be back to normal, but for now all I will say is: boo hoo.

Also, cheers to ANA for being understanding and refunding our money. Boos mixed with hmmm to HIS Chatan for refusing to refund our money until 30 minutes into a heated discussion.

Report from Ogasawara

Hello everyone,

JDR here, finally back in high-speed internet land. Just a quick report on the Ogasawara trip that FS and I went on with Yanagi-san.

Ogasawara is an amazing place; only 3000 people and many uninhabited islands. Even the inhabited islands are relatively pristine. Ogasawara is aiming to become a World Natural Heritage site, and thus the government of Tokyo is spending much money to eradicate introduced species and protect endemic species. Ogasawara has a very high amount of endemic species, and the ecosystem has many open niches, resulting in a unique ecosystem that is easily threatened by introduced species and by development.

Anyways, we found some zoanthids (!) and anemones, so we return to Okinawa very happy. A big thanks to Yanagi-san and Sasaki-san for doing all the work to make this trip possible.

cheers! JDR

Short report ''Ishigaki trip''

We have come back from Ishigaki Island (Okinawa, Japan) .

However we have worried about the weather at first, it was nice weather.
We could make 3 dives on each 3 day!

It was a little cold under the water, but we had fun. There were a lot of hard & soft corals. Zoanthids were not plenty, but all of us found own samples.
Especially YI and CA collected many samples!

We also enjoyed fishing and flesh 'Sashimi (sliced raw fish-from Captain)' on the boat.

Yarabu-san & Captain, thank you very much for your support!
See you next GW!