ESJ 2018 in Sapporo

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Several Arilab members attended the 65th Annual Meeting of the Ecological Society of Japan in Sapporo, Hokkeido, from March 14th to march 18th. It was a great opportunity for students, postdocs, and staff scientists to present Arilab research to a broader Japanese audience. At the same time, it was a good occasion for networking, chatting about potential future collaborations, and learn more about the research done in other labs throughout Japan.

Spearheaded by Nick Friedman and supported by Nao Takashina and Francisco Hita Garcia our lab organized a successful English-speaking symposium with the title “Biodiversity: linking biogeographic pattern and process”.

Masashi Yoshimura also gave an interesting about the OKEON Churamori Project and Yuka Suzuki successfully presented her poster showing her PhD project.

We also enjoyed the local Hokkeido cuisine, especially a visit to the Sapporo Bier Garten!

OIST Science Challenge 2018: Measuring Biodiversity

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Every year OIST hosts the Science Challenge, which is organized by the Graduate School as an opportunity for Japanese undergraduate students to explore scientific career options. Over the course of a few days the students participate in a number of activities that focus on the diversity of scientific paths and introduce ways to develop the international communication skills necessary for success.

The Biodiversity and Biocomplexity Unit organized a hands-on activity for the 2018 science challenge. Twelve students signed up, making the “Measuring Biodiversity” activity the most popular at OIST for the second year in a row. The goal of the activity was to quantify the diversity of insects in a vial given a short period of time and no taxonomic expertise. This year’s students were really enthusiastic about using their observations to quantify biodiversity, and had some great ideas about how to do this at scale in the future.

Nick Friedman, Takuma Yoshida, Ayumi Inoguchi, Adam Khalife, and Georg Fischer helped out with the activity.

New paper on Indo-Pacific ant biogeography

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New paper out on Prenolepis genus group in the Indo-Pacific published in Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution. The study is a collaboration between many of the usual Pacific ants suspects, and was led by our longtime collaborator Milan Janda and his (now former) student Pavel Matos-Maravi.  They deftly used complex set of analyses to test a series interesting biogeographic hypotheses.  Nice work Pavel and Milan!

New paper on global macro-invasion dynamics

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A new paper on global macro-invasion dynamics led by Hanno Seebens, Franz Essl, and the GLONAF group has just come out in PNAS.  We were happy to contribute our GABI data on alien ant emergence and spread over time. Main punch line is that emergence of new invaders comes from expansion of trade networks and environmental change into new source pools and this keeps the rate of new emergence high.  Check it out!

Lab retreat to Iheya

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Our lab decided to take a trip to Iheya island the second week of December 2017, in order to explore different parts of Okinawa, but also to celebrate the end of Cong’s PhD defense and Yuka’s proposal defense.

The island is full of goats and sculptures made from marine debris. We also visited a cave, a beach, hiked to the top of a small mountain, and had some good food and drinks.


Nick (our post-doc who does a lot of research on acoustics and birds) also did some bird watching on the island, and below is a list of birds he saw on Iheya:

Eurasian Teal
Suzume
Hiyodori
Chinese Turtle Dove
Japanese Bush Warbler
Pale Thrush
Blue Rock Thrush
Japanese White-eye
Grey faced Buzzard
Japanese Sparrowhawk
Japanese Wood Pigeon
Little Grebe
Great grey egret
Osprey
Little egret
Pacific Swallow
Intermediate Egret
Zitting Cisticola
Daurian Redstart
Tufted Duck

Apart from bird watching, Takuma (our technician leading the field team who is a great taxonomist) also collected insects during our hike.

Until next time, Iheya!

(Most images taken by Cong Liu)