On July 1st I traveled north of Nagoya to
Iwate Prefecture, which among other things is home to the town of Rikuzen-takata and its
Sea and Shell Museum.
There were lots of holotype and paratype specimens and I got a chance to sample 35 buccinid
protoconchs, which is part of my project.
Amazingly, this was covered by the local
newspaper!
After a fews days of museum work and exhausting media attention (hee hee) I was antsy to explore the area. With the assistance of the curator I rented a bike. He checked my tire pressure and advised me to stay away from trucks.
Then I was off for a few hours with a Japanese map and my camera! For more pictures, see
here.
One other thing that was
particularly interesting about Rikuzen-Takata was the kind of pet sold in the local Family Mart.
I loved having small pets as a kid, though mine were fluffy hamsters (see below) usually named after WWF professional wrestlers.
The childhood pets of choice in northern Japan are not hamsters, but
Rhinoceras beetles! Sugoi!
These
beetles are in a subfamily of the scarabs, the group immortalized in ancient
Egyptian art. The rhinoceras beetle group has around 1,400 species and the scarab family in total has around 27,000 species. The snail family that I study, the Buccinidae, has maybe 1,000 or so species, though the relationships of all of these snails to each other is not well understood. For comparison; there are about 250 species of primates including us, about 4,500 species of mammals, 65,000 species of snails, 350,000 species of beetles, and 800,000+ species of insects nearly half of which are beetles.
There were lots of holotype and paratype specimens and I got a chance to sample 35 buccinid protoconchs, which is part of my project.
Amazingly, this was covered by the local newspaper!
After a fews days of museum work and exhausting media attention (hee hee) I was antsy to explore the area. With the assistance of the curator I rented a bike. He checked my tire pressure and advised me to stay away from trucks.
Then I was off for a few hours with a Japanese map and my camera! For more pictures, see here.
One other thing that was particularly interesting about Rikuzen-Takata was the kind of pet sold in the local Family Mart.
I loved having small pets as a kid, though mine were fluffy hamsters (see below) usually named after WWF professional wrestlers.
The childhood pets of choice in northern Japan are not hamsters, but Rhinoceras beetles! Sugoi!
These beetles are in a subfamily of the scarabs, the group immortalized in ancient Egyptian art. The rhinoceras beetle group has around 1,400 species and the scarab family in total has around 27,000 species. The snail family that I study, the Buccinidae, has maybe 1,000 or so species, though the relationships of all of these snails to each other is not well understood. For comparison; there are about 250 species of primates including us, about 4,500 species of mammals, 65,000 species of snails, 350,000 species of beetles, and 800,000+ species of insects nearly half of which are beetles.
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