A WARRNAMBOOL lecturer faced the most harrowing scenes of her life during a two-week study tour of Japan.
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Deakin University researcher Dr Alecia Bellgrove described the visit to a tsunami-affected area as “very confronting and humbling”.
As part of her investigation into the evolution, ecology and complex life cycles of red seaweed, Dr Bellgrove, a researcher with the school of life and environmental sciences, returned to the Shizugawa Nature Centre where she had undertaken post doctoral studies.
But the centre, like most of the city of nearly 140,000 people, had been destroyed in the wake of the devastating March tsunami.
Dr Bellgrove’s former colleagues had managed to move to higher ground and survived but more than 800 people in the town were killed.
“There are constant reminders of the devastation wherever you look,” she said. “To see weeds growing through concrete floors where houses used to be and to see boats in the middle of fields was very upsetting.”
Video footage of the tsunami as it crushed Shizugawa, taken from a hillside school, has been seen by millions of people on YouTube. But knowledge of the devastation couldn’t prepare Dr Bellgrove for what she encountered.
“A lot has been done to clear the debris and fix roads but there are still hundreds of people living in prefabricated buildings in refugee centres.”
The city will never be rebuilt in the valley and Dr Bellgrove said there were no plans to reconstruct the nature centre.
“It was on the coast and it was destroyed. My former colleagues have been working from the temporary city hall and are helping to get the fishing fleet back on its feet but after that they have no long-term job prospects.”
The coast at Shizugawa subsided by one metre as a result of the earthquake, making it impossible for Dr Bellgrove to collect inter-tidal seaweed species from the area. “I was there at the tail-end of a typhoon and there was too much swell to get into the water to get any samples,” she said.
Dr Bellgrove collected seaweed tissues from other parts of Japan and her colleagues from Shizugawa will collect samples from the devastated area when conditions improve.
The samples obtained during her Japanese tour have been returned to Australia for DNA extraction and microsatellite development and analysis which will be carried out early next year.
The tour was funded by the Australian Academy of Science.
“We want to get a better understanding of the significance of the complex life cycles of red seaweeds, what this means for the dispersal and persistence of the species and insights into how easily they may recover from disturbances such as typhoons and tsunamis,” Dr Bellgrove said.
Part of the study is looking at how a mass disturbance impacts on marine species and how their dispersal abilities influence their capacity to recover.
Dr Bellgrove said understanding more about the ecology and evolutionary process in Japan would help improve knowledge about Australian seaweed.
“At the moment there is very little known about seaweed in Australia, despite the fact that we have amongst the greatest biodiversity of seaweeds globally, so what we learn in Japan can be applied to our local habitat.”