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Can you match up the Team Echinacea member with his or her handle, that is, the alias used over the walkie talkie radios? Answers to be posted later this week … The real deal The clever handle In an attempt to outflog the rest of the team, I will describe what we did today. In the morning, most of us collected data for the phenology exp. No new plants had flowered, but some mistakes were caught in the flagging of positions from yesterday. I saw one of the large Halictid bees going to town on one of the flowering heads.Then until about 1, most of us headed out to the landfill site with different tasks in mind. I needed to do a test run of the FNC (I get tired of writing out floral neighborhood characterization) to see what obstacles we are going to face and about how long each one will take. Amanda helped me ID plants and test out the general protocol and it took about five minutes but there only 4 co-flowering species–Amorpha canascens, toothed evening primrose, Phlox pilosa, and Northern Bedstraw. Some species are more difficult to quantify in terms of number, such as Galium. After some discussion with Stuart, I think we will probably count each inflorescence as 1 “unit” so that counting the number of co-flowering species will be systematic and consistent. And now for more pretty pictures: My project is almost ready to start this week! I will be hand pollinating heads on 20 flowering plants in the ’96 section of the CG with different species of foreign pollen and Echinacea pollen to simulate pollen loads arriving from generalist pollinators. The Echinacea pollen will be applied at the same time as the foreign pollen, 4 hours after, or not at all depending on the treatment. I should start painting bracts for the first flowers in the next couple of days. After discussing the pros and cons of different pollinator exclusion methods, I have decided I will use bags for the 20 plants in my study, and cages for the plants I will be taking pollen from frequently. All my plants now have blue flags in the CG. Ruth brought new paint for us to use, including a lovely new dark purple color. Thanks Ruth! I have also decided to use 3 different foreign pollen donors and no mixes for my treatments. After some practicing collecting pollen from different species at the Landfill, here are the best species I have come up with that have easy to collect pollen: Other possibilities: Also, the bike gang is now 7 deep, so K-town betta watchout! Allegra Look at this paper to see some nice photos of Echinacea floral parts (Wist and Davis 2008). Here’s a file with plants that Allegra can use for her pollen interference/precedence experiment. These are all plants identified yesterday as going to flower in 2009. Plants are sorted according to priority order–random, except that plants from site of origin “Unknown” are given priority 1. I recommend going down the list and excluding all plants that don’t have at least two promising heads. Flag all included plants with labels 1, 2, 3, …. Stop when you have enough for your experiment. Ask Gretel which color flag to use. Blue is an option because your plants are in CG96 and Andrea’s are in CG97. Here is an outline of the form needed for doing the aphid searches: Rosette Count Leaf Count Length of Longest leaf – cm Ant Presence – Yes/No Size of Aphid Infestation (Required Field) – Categories 0, 1, 2-10, 11-80, >80 Count of Leaves with Aphids Spittlebug Presence – Yes/No Distance from Plant to Spittlebug – 0 if on the Echinacea Plant itself So, in an attempt to fit as many sampling needs as possible, here are the sites that we will be sampling for aphids, juvenile plants, and some tissue samples, along with the sampling strategies: We will use a couple different sampling strategies for the different remnants in order to try and randomize them as much as possible. These should accomodate Daniel’s, Amy’s and a portion of Jennifer’s project. Note: All belt transects are 1/2 m unless otherwise noted. Staffanson – Select 3 random locations in both the burned and unburned plots using randomly selected ULM coordinates, and find them using the Trimble GPS. Then, choose a random compass direction and run the belt transect roughly 10 m in that direction. Landfill – Choose 3 random locations on the East Hill (Trimble again), choose a random direction, and do a 3-5 m belt transect in that direction. If more plants are needed, go a little further KJ’s – Choose 3 random locations, choose a random direction, and do a 3-5 m belt transect. Go further if needed. Nessman – Since this is a roadside remnant, choose 5 random points along the road edge, and extend the belt perpendicular from the road to the cornfield. East Riley – choose 5 random points along the road edge, and extend the belt perpendicular from the road to the edge of the remnant Steven’s Approach – Choose a bunch of random points along the road, and inspect to see if there are plants present. If not, go to the next point. Northwest of Landfill – choose 5 random points along the road edge, and extend the belt perpendicular from the road to the edge of the remnant. Randt – Choose a bunch of random points along the road, and inspect to see if there are plants present. If not, go to the next point. East of Town Hall – Select random points used for seedling search, and look for plants there. Here’s Jennifer’s preliminary list of sites. She wants a total of ten sites and wants to sample from all that are asterisked. Populations for sampling Aa We have several microscopes and we would like to capture digital images of what we see–especially pollen grains. Which on should we pick? Any advice would be appreciated. Here are some links to pages about several models of inexpensive USB cameras that can mount to a microscope: microsope.com sells several brand. They sell only one line from bigC. Here’s a company that sells the EM series from bigC. documentation pages on the bigC product line (more on the AM series than the EM series). Another source of info on the Moticam line. I scanned this list of companies that sell (and used to sell) microscope accessories to find the above links. FYI I stumbled across some pollen identification keys: a taxonomic list, a key to pollen of the bahamas, and an inaccessible “pollen database” that sounds good. |
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