The 61st ESJ Tohoku Meeting in Zao Yamagata

The Ecological Society of Japan (ESJ) is to promote research in all aspects of ecology and one of its branch is in Tohoku area. As my research investigating the suitable temperature of mud snail, I participated The 61st ESJ Tohoku Meeting which was held in Zao-Yamagata 29 to 30 November 2016. This is first time for me to participate the scientific conference and had a presentation.

Some other students from other laboratory and I went together to the venue, Zao center plaza. We arrived at 1PM. It was quite compact venue comparing to the annual conference in national level. One thing I’m a little suprised about is that younger people dominating the conferece. There were 54 participants (22 common person and 32 university students)in with 10 poster presentations and 19 oral presentations. Two of oral presentations were delivered in English.

The fisrt day, general lecture was given by Kentaro Arikawa with ‘How do butterflies see the world’. It was interesting topic since butterflies indeed have different way of visions with human. The second lecture was ‘How do plants survive in complicated world’by Ryou Yamao and continued by four oral presentations. Poster presentations were held after dinner. The second day, there were 15 oral presentations including mine. I presented about 'Effects of temperature on performance of Chinese mystery snail'. Some topics were discussed e.g. forestry ecology: respiratory of trees, bamboo, seeds; insect ecology: ladybug breeding intervension etc.; aquatic weeds ecosystem: phytoplankton and other topics related to ecology as well. All of the presentations had its own interesting features.

Some of evaluation points –especially for myself- are, preparing the presentation is a must and very important and also knowing other researchers experiment may raised our research idea in the future.

NB: Zao is a mountain park where famous of Snow monster and hot spring. Autumn in Zao was awsome as well.