Tag: OKEON

Joint talk event between OIST and the Okinawa Municipal Museum this Sunday

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This Sunday, on November 6, 2016, there will be a joint talk event between the Okinawa municipal museum (沖縄市立郷土博物館) and OIST, held at the Okinawa municipal museum. The first talk is going to be presented by the curator of the museum, and it is titled “Why is Okinawa city the entrance to Yanbaru”? The second talk is given by Yoshi, the coordinator of the OKEON Churamori project, and his talk is titled “Figuring out the biodiversity of Okinawa – OKEON Churamori project”.OIST will also have a booth set up at the event.

The talk will start at 1:30 pm and will be held at the 4th floor of the Okinawa Cultural Center, in the entertainment hall.
If you have any questions please contact the Okinawa municipal museum at 098-932-6882.

Rare ant found in OKEON sample

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A rarely-collected ant species, Protanilla lini, has been identified from a SLAM trap sample that was collected from Hentona High School (site04) between September and October last year. Protanilla lini belongs to the subfamily Leptanillinae. All members of the family are small, subterranean and often blind ants that are very rarely collected. We know very little about their biology, but we believe they are predators of larger prey such as centipedes or earthworms. It is likely that they perform some form of “dracula ant feeding behavior”, where the adults hunt large prey, but instead of feeding on it themselves they take their larvae to the prey, the adults then drink the haemolymph (or “blood”) of the larvae without causing any physical damage.

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Distribution of Protanilla lini, image from antmaps.org

 

This species has been recorded only in Taiwan and Okinawa. It has been collected only once before in Okinawa, and a couple of times in Taiwan.

The information and the specimen images were provided by our staff scientist Paco Hita Garcia.

OKEON Churamori Project presented at International Congress of Entomology 2016

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The nearly one-week long XXV International Congress of Entomology, under the theme Entomology without Borders, took place in Orlando this year from September 25-30. It brought together the largest delegation of scientists and experts in the history of the discipline with over 7000 participants and over 2000 talks, with topics ranging from biodiversity conservation to ecology and evolution to science communication.

Yoshi, a staff scientist of arilab and the coordinator of the OKEON project, represented the rest of the OKEON team at the conference by presenting a poster on the project. The poster, titled OKEON Chura-mori Project: A new environmental monitoring project in Okinawa, Japan , introduced the project and described its various components, including GIS, field network, genomics pipeline, as well as emphasized its collaborative nature by outlining the various partners of the project.

You can see the original poster here.