POST NUMBER 500!! Pros and Cons of Studying Elsewhere

Here's our latest post, and it's a real milestone. Welcome to the FIVE HUNDREDTH post on our science writing blog! This one's a trip down memory lane.

Pros and Cons of Studying Elsewhere

by Raymond Nakamura

Ecology is a science in which place makes a big difference to what you study. During the pandemic, travel is not advised, so I thought I'd share some memories of when I went to Japan to study, as a kind of thought experiment.

As an undergraduate, I studied zoology as my specialist subject and Japanese language as my minor. I found out from studying French in high school, that if you don't use it, you lose it. One of my Japanese professors told me studying language would be boring, so I should learn it while studying something I was interested in. I figured that since Japan was an archipelago, it would be a good place to study marine biology. Never mind that my lowest grades were in Japanese language and marine biology.

This was back before the Internet, so finding Japanese professors took a bit of effort. I had to go through the library and scour the papercut delivering pages of scientific journals. Eventually, Professor Taiji Kikuchi at the Amakusa Marine Biological Laboratory of Kyushu University accepted me.

So I left my family home in the city of Toronto and packed up to live on my own in a little village in southern Japan. I ended up studying the population ecology of a stalked barnacle, Capitulum mitella. 

This meant marking more than a hundred individuals that I would measure during every low tide cycle. 

During the winter, that meant going out in the middle of the night.

 

Sometimes I went further afield to help with studies on endangered species...

...or surveys of less studied habitats, such as Zamami Island in Okinawa.

Sometimes I came across different creatures while doing research or during the course of my travels.

 

I also had the opportunity to find life in my own home. 

 

I found that studying disagreeable things is a way to cope with their existence. 

 

Others were more occasional visitors, such as land crabs, mice, spiders, and centipedes.

 

I realized I preferred my wildlife outdoors.

That was all many tide cycles ago. I now live in Vancouver, where I am a lapsed biologist, more interested in sharing discoveries by other people than working out my own. I practise Japanese on an app called Duolingo. And when the moon is full, I just think, "Isn't that pretty," instead of, “Gosh, these rocks are cold."