Study In The Winter

This is my first winter in Japan because I never had experience in the winter, I decided to study about freshwater ecosystem during winter season. In this winter I visited 4 placed for study. Study in the winter is so hard, because sometime I felt so cold until I can not feel my hand sense even I used hand gloves. Two weeks ago I visited yutagawa area and all of area covered by snow. It is very beautiful scenery but it was so hard to search some snails in the mud of paddy field or canals because of snow. We should dig snow and mud to see some creature, suddenly we found fish in the canals still survived. From this study I can understand canals is very important for many creatures during winter, lot of them moved to canals. Why they choose canals? My hypothesis is Japanese paddy field system is drying their field during winter and many of aquatic organism like some snails need water and mud so they moved to canals and in the canals they can find some deeper area to protect their selves from snow it can be see in Oyama area. In Yutagawa area we can see some shallow still can be find in the paddy field some mudsnails gathering in that area and buried themselves. When snow covered all area it still have some space between shallow water and ice so they can still survived. Based on my study yutagawa and oyama area has good abundance of mudsnails and other creatures. It is very interesting study for me.