Echinacea angustifolia is the only species of Echinacea native to Minnesota, but it is not the only Echinacea species that currently inhabits MN. In the Echinacea Project study area, there are actually three different Echinacea species: E. angustifolia, E. pallida, and E. purpurea. Both non-native species were introduced in restorations from seed that was not locally sourced. We know that non-natives hybridize with our native Echinacea, and we fear that introgression with hybrids may result in genetic swamping of E. angustifolia. We want to learn as much as we can about similarities and differences between Echinacea species in MN so we can assess the threat level of non-native Echinacea in Solem Township and take the proper steps to alleviate the potential threat.
There have been reports that ploidy level varies among Echinacea species (McGregor 1968; McKeown 1999). Specifically, E. pallida is reportedly tetraploid (4n) throughout most of its range, while E. angustifolia and E. purpurea are diploid (2n). There are also reports of E. angustifolia in Oklahoma and Texas being tetraploid (this is a different variety of E. angustifolia from the one we study). Nonetheless, we are interested in the ploidy of Echinacea in MN because it affects whether hybrids are able to reproduce. If a diploid mates with a tetraploid, it produces triploid (3n) offspring; triploids are generally not fertile. Thus, ploidy of non-natives greatly affects the ability of non-native Echinacea to genetically swamp E. angustifolia by creating fertile hybrids.
E. pallida head – the flowering heads are distinguishable by pollen color and ray floret color/length.
E. angustifolia head
To investigate ploidy differences between Echinacea species in Minnesota, we will collect and dry tissue from the three different Echinacea species and their hybrids and assess relative genome size using a flow cytometer at the Chicago Botanic Garden. We will also assess relative genome size in seedlings grown from seeds sourced from various latitudes in our species’ ranges to see if the individual species vary in ploidy level throughout their range.
This is the flow cytometer – the machine used to assess relative genome size at the CBG.
Each year, we assess flowering phenology in experimental plots to determine mating potential for individual plants and see how a number of factors may affect flowering phenology. Some of the factors we have investigated in the past include heritability, burning, and climate.
2019 was truly a special year for Echinacea flowering phenology in experimental plots. There were flowering plants in four – yes FOUR – experimental plots. We had the usual flowering plants in exPt1 and exPt2 at Hegg Lake. We also had a flowering plant in exPt8 (qgen2 and qgen3) and exPt9 at Hegg Lake. Unfortunately, we did not see the flowering plant with an E. pallida dam at exPt9 until late in the season, so we did not take phenology in exPt9.
This Echinacea head is mid-flowering. It has more than 2 rows shedding pollen and more than 11 immature florets.
This year, we visited the three other plots and followed the usual Echinacea phenology protocol. We recorded first flowering day and subsequently recorded dates of “mid” and “late” flowering. Finally, we recorded the final flowering date of each plant.
In addition to the single flowering plants in exPt8 and exPt9, exPt1 had 63 flowering heads we tracked for phenology and exPt2 had a whopping 1207! The first flowering head in exPt1 started on July 3rd, while the first head in exPt2 started flowering on July 1st. The last day of flowering in exPt1 and exPt2 was August 21st. What a long summer of taking phenology data!
Data/
materials collected:phenology data (start date, mid flowering, end date,
etc…), harvested heads for the ACE protocol. All phenology data can be found in
the cgData repository in the subfolder p1p2Phenology.
Echinacea pallida is a species of Echinacea that is not native to
Minnesota. It was mistakenly introduced to our study area during a restoration
of Hegg Lake WMA. Since 2011, Team Echinacea has visited the pallida restoration and taken flowering
phenology and collected demography on the non-native. This year, we decapitated
all flowering Echinacea pallida to
avoid interspecific pollination with the local Echinacea angustifolia. We fear that Echinacea hybrids may be infertile, so we want to avoid the
establishment of as many hybrids as possible.
This year, a team slogged through the Hegg Lake restoration to find flowering Echinacea pallida. We recorded the number of heads on each plant, the number of rosettes (some plants were absolutely massive), shot gps points at all plants, and then chopped the flowering heads off! We visited the restoration and cut E. pallida heads off on July 8th, 9th and 10th of 2019. We revisited plants and shot gps points for them on July 11th, July 12th, and August 1st.
You can distinguish E. pallida and angustifolia heads by pollen color; E. angustifolia has yellow pollen, but E. pallida has white pollen (above).
Overall, we found and shot points
for 97 flowering E. pallida. On
average, each plant produced 2.5 flowering heads. That’s way more than an
average E.angustifolia!The average
rosette count was 5.4, another big number! The largest plant had 23 rosettes.
We collected tissue samples of E. angustifolia, E. pallida, and known hybrids so Elif can assess ploidy at the Chicago Botanic Garden using the flow cytometer.
Start year: 2011
Location: Hegg Lake
Wildlife Management Area Restoration
Data collected: Demography data, head counts, rosette counts, gps points shot for each E. pallida. Cut Echinacea pallida heads, tissue samples for ploidy analysis. Find demo and phenology visor records in the aiisummer2019 repository. Phenology visor records were taken when we cut heads and demography records were taken when we shot GPS points. GPS points can be found in Demap.
Tate Rosenhagen, an intern from Lake Forest College who spent four week days with the Echinacea Project doing seed research, finished a poster with findings about Echinacea reproductive output and achene weight. We really enjoyed having Tate around, he brought a lot of positive vibes and insightful questions to the lab. Tate is great!
Last Thursday, we had our annual Team Echinacea potluck to honor the work of lab volunteers over the past year. Stuart discussed why what we do is so important and how the work of volunteers helps us to answer important scientific questions. Some great recent milestones accomplished by volunteers include:
Allen, Sam, and Anne reaching 500,000 achenes counted
All 2017 heads have been cleaned, rechecked, and scanned
670,000 achenes were counted and 113,000 achenes were classified in 2019 (so far)
In addition to a general overview of the Echinacea Project’s goals, members of the lab who have individual projects talked about what they are working on. These projects are: Erin’s remnant flowering intervals, Drake’s prairie parasites, Lea’s floral neighborhood, Elif’s congener ploidy project, and Riley’s prairie fragment crosses. It was really great to talk about research and hear about a number of projects.
Most importantly, though, I want to thank all people who volunteer their time to the lab. Without you, the cutting-edge science we do is impossible. Truly, you are making huge contributions to science and our understanding of plant reproductive fitness in anthropogenically fragmented landscapes. Your work is so appreciated, and we are so lucky to have you all around!
Oh, by the way, the food was absolutely wonderful. 11/10.
Team Echinacea IL! Front (L to R): Drake, Lea, Erin, Stuart Middle (L to R): Char, Shelley, Allen, Laura, Elif, Gretel Back (L to R): Marty, Art, Tessa, Riley, Mike, AldoFolks eat and Stuart talks about an Echinacea Project paper.Stuart tries to get a good angle on a photo of Riley and Aldo – photoception.Lea, Elif, and Riley. Stuart, Allen, Tessa, and Shelley. Shelley did not see that someone was taking a photo. Laura, Erin, and Stuart.
All of these photos are courtesy of Ray, a volunteer in the photography group. Thank you very much, Ray!!
Recently, Team Echinacea welcomed a new member, Elif Taskiran. Elif has a PhD in economics, but has recently expressed interest in biological sciences. The Echinacea Project is happy to have her on board! Elif volunteers her time on Fridays, where she engages in data entry and cleans heads. Elif also attends weekly lab meetings, where she engages in paper discussion and gives feedback on various works of the team (like presentations and proposals).
Elif is also very interested in using Chicago Botanic Garden’s flow cytometer to understand ploidy differences between Echinacea angustifolia, E. pallida, E. purpurea, and Echinacea hybrids. We hope this project will be fruitful! Thank you, Elif, for all of your work so far with the Echinacea Project. We look forward to your work in the future!
Last Friday, I was dispatched by Stuart to find the number of plants/ achenes planted in each experimental plot, along with the number alive as of a recent year (2017-2019, based on the plot). Although records of some plots were a bit harder to come across that others, I was able to compile data from each plot (besides p10 – planted 2019 – data coming soon). This would not have been possible without the help of Gretel, so thanks GK! I have attached a small datasheet with the survival data.
In the history of the Echinacea Project, the team has sown 31,888 Echinacea viable achenes in experimental plots. There were many more sown that likely did not have a seed. Team members found 3634 seedlings from these seeds, not including Amy D’s experimental plot 3 and remnant seedling refinds. The team has planted 18,869 Echinacea seedlings in experimental plots, not including p10 – planted at West Central Area HS in 2019. Finally, 7090 Echinacea are currently alive in the experimental plots!
On this day, September 24th, 2019, Erin, Drake, and I planned to have a regular field day. The weather was nice and the motivation was present, but somehow things just didn’t go our way. Early in the morning, I went into G3 to find another mouse was trapped trying to get in the seed drier (for context, we found 4 mice in traps yesterday (Monday) and Drake was going to flog about them but forgot). Nonetheless, it was a surprising start to the day.
Then things started going downhill… and no, we didn’t measure P2 today (for those of you who are unaware of the layout of P2, it is arranged on a slight slope. Yay puns). We went to do demography at the Town Hall site, but ended up venturing through dense thicket and corn only to find ourselves in a random person’s yard. They had a dog and it was scary. Only later did we find out that those points were no longer meant to be in the stake file. Rat! Even after avoiding those points entirely, demo at Town Hall was rough. Many of the points were under a pile of lopped juniper; dry awn leaves are deadly, and my hands are still bleeding from digging through desiccated branches.
The thicket we went through at Town Hall to get to… a person’s back yard.
After our adventure at Town Hall, we did demo and seedling refinds at the aptly named East Town Hall site. There, we found 4 new flowering Echinacea (which is actually quite amazing considering we only visited 30 existing plants). We also found a deer skull. AND AN ENTIRE DEER VERTEBRAL COLUMN. My mind essentially imploded when I realized I stepped on what I thought was a rock but turned out to be a spine... Wow. Just wow.
A deer skull (there was maybe some brain still left in it). The deer spine… SO cool to see intact.
After lunch, Erin and I finished harvesting heads in P1! All experimental plot harvesting is done now! Hooray! did some measuring… Except the mosquitoes were incredibly bad and I forgot water. After one row, we went back to Hjelm to get some bug spray but thing quickly got complicated. As I emerged from the kitchen of Hjelm after refilling my water, Erin pulled a honey bee out of her hair (she thought it was a Bouteloua fruit). The honey bee decided to be cool and stab her finger with its stinger. Not a great place to be stung if you need fingers to measure and use Visors. Fortunately, the cool, refreshing taste of an ice pack was able to keep Erin going, and we were able to measure more rows in P1 and collect some sideoats seed as a team before the day ended!
Today was a new type of day for me and Erin. When we arrived to the farm, we arrived to a ghost town. No other members of Team Echinacea present, Stuart was away, and Dwight and Jean were even out of town. The only other folks present were the goats. It was good to see at least someone was in town.
Unbeknownst to me and Erin, the goats were plotting escape. Last night, an extremely powerful storm swept through Solem Township (and most of Northern Minnesota). When Erin and I looked outside during the storm on Labor Day evening, rain appeared to be coming down in sheets. Needless to say, it was extremely windy. This left multiple escape points for goats to exit the paddock due to large dead trees and branches lowering the fence. Fortunately, Erin made a heroic decision to check if the fences had any debris, and when we saw that they were being dragged down by trees, we sprung into action.
This dead tree was a heavy one that was still partially rooted… Erin and I couldn’t move it off the fence so we had to saw it.
Our plan was simple… Erin distracted the goats with food on one side of the paddock while I went to work making sure dead tree parts were off the fence. However, while we were planning, Baby, tried to escape the fence at the section in the photo above. A while ago, Baby and I got into a bit of a tussle when I tried herding her back into the group by grabbing her and more or less dragging her back into the herd by force. While I was doing that, I tripped… Some observers said that Baby “gave me a full-out suplex” that day (that, of course, is just a rumor). Nonetheless, Erin was able to stop Baby in her tracks while she tried to escape. Erin out-muscled and out-smarted Baby to get her back into the paddock while I set up a temporary fence. Only later did I find out that Erin is the current WWE Champion.
In the end, Erin did a wonderful job distracting goats while I moved and sawed dead trees and branches. It is good to know that all the hours we spent training to herd goats finally paid off, and the two of us were able to do it alone.
The rest of the day, Erin and I went out to Staffenson Prairie Preserve and finished flowering demo, did seedling refinds at Nessman, and did some measuring in P1 (while hearing the goats bleat at us the whole time… we bleated back some, too). In the end, it was a good, productive day, and I look forward to the next few weeks of field work with this ultimate skeleton crew.
Hello Echination! Hope all is going well for the folks back home reading my flog. For us in Kensington, the week has been full of three things: demography, measuring in p1, and seedling refinds. Although these tasks can be somewhat monotonous, the team is highly efficient at the tasks and we definitely have fun doing them! One of the ways the team has had fun is by visiting the many friends we find near and on Echinacea. Many are large arthropods, but sometimes we get to spend time with cute little froggies! Look at them:
Woah, a hawkmoth caterpillar!My personal not-favorite, a garden spider.A FUNGUS ON BUCKTHORN!?! This is interesting… anyone have thoughts on what it is?
