This file lists places to look for spittlebug spittle masses in the CG. At the top there are rows in the 99 garden and the 99S garden sorted randomly. Then all bigbatch rows (noted with end positions) are listed in a random order.
Enjoy your search!
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Lots of plans for this week! Here are some highlights. This week we will start systematic observations of Echinacea flowering phenology in the CG experiment. We want to know the first and last day of flowering for every head of every Echinacea plant in the CG. The main event early in the week will be to put a twist tie on every head that looks like it will flower. We will also put a flag near every flowering plant with its location on the flag. We have to get the locations (plant ids) correct and get it into a database. As of Sunday, four plants in the CG had started to flower, how many left to go? We will also record flowering phenology at Staffanson Prairie Preserve. We will observe many fewer plants, but it’s a long walk. Under the supervision of DR, we will spend ~1h looking for more spittle masses on Ea in the CG. Jennifer and Diedre are coming from IL this Sunday and will stay for the week. They will help set up the phenology flags. They also plan to collect tissue from plants in several remnants to do a population genetic study using microsatellites (DNA markers). Daniel and Amy will make a plan for searching for aphids and juvenile plants in remnants. Caroline will fill us in on her plans. The competition of pollinators crew (M “floral neighborhoods” J, A “bee’s knees” G, K “style” G, A “the experimenter” H, and G “pollen from the source” D) will plan and practice for their project. Here are some things they will do… GPS (maybe): Daniel & Amy. What are we going to do about that tripod? Hi all–“Joker” here. I just spent some time reading all the flog entries from this month–I think I am caught up now! I really enjoyed reading your project proposals, and hearing about them on Friday. I’m excited about what we are going to learn this summer about aphids, ants and spittlebugs, and about floral neighborhoods, pollinators, pollen competition, etc. Good stuff! I’m also looking forward to sharing my experimental plans with the team. Since I’m not in K-town for the weekend, I thought you might need a joke to tide you over. Here’s the latest from our daily redneck calendar: You might be a redneck if you think re-booting your computer means kicking it twice. 🙂 Here’s what I’ve come up with for the revisions to my original proposal as of Friday’s group discussion; it is not in full form yet but I wanted to flog what I have so far so that people could read it and correct any mistakes I’ve made, make suggestions, etc. Thanks Oh and friday was a big day in the common garden because the first Echinacea plant (in the 99garden I believe) released its pollen. Tomorrow we will investigate to see if any more have followed suit. We also searched for spittle on Echinacea plants for an hour on friday to help Daniel know whether he has a sufficient sample size and found 22 with spittle on them in roughly half the garden. Here is some information passed on to me by Megan Jensen about the breeding systems of common native prairie species. Notice, there are many holes! Hopefully, this sort of information will assist us in moving to a new, exciting phase of the Echinacea project … which everyone will have to wait just a little longer to hear about. Have I piqued your interest? There was a nice steady rain this afternoon at the farm. Although the National Weather Service says we accumulated less than 0.1 in, I think the plants will take full advantage of precipitation in this unusually dry season. Point precipitation map for Minnesota June 24, 2009 The picture below shows the head that is leading the pack to flowering (row 46.67 pos 953.67). Its ray florets are spreading. As of June 22 about 50 heads had ray florets that were “up” (the ray florets were longer than the bracts of the receptacle).
These are pictures that I took in the common garden today. We finished searching for seedlings at the last site (Staffanson Prairie Preserve) on Monday. All the datasheets & maps (163 pages) are now organized in a 3-ring binder. Here are a few highlights: We found total of … In August we’ll go back and check the fate of every one of those seedlings. I hope we can find them all! Mimi, Amanda, Greg, Allegra, Daniel, Caroline, and Gretel
looking for seedlings on the scraped roadside at Riley’s site. (They didn’t find any here.) Two possible Echinacea seedlings (not counted above) were noted. We should go back to check their identity within the next week. At site NWLF we left a pin flag at focal plant #13073. At site ERI the possible Echinacea seedling was at R102 (see page 97). Help me remember to check these! We found about 500 other Echinacea plants within the circles, mostly juvenile plants and some adults (flowering and not). The roadsides at sites ER and ERI were scraped. In the area that was scraped, all the tags are gone. We did see many little Echinacea leaves peeking through the gravel, but no seedlings. In some areas the scraping was deeper and some roots of old plants were pulled out. I collected one pulled root from the S side of the road on the W half of RI; I couldn’t tell from where it was yanked. The root was huge!
With our very precise maps of plants from previous years, we will be able to identify which plants are gone and which persist. It will be a challenge though. In some dense areas we may not be able to figure it out. Stay tuned, we’ll bring the detailed maps and try to figure it all out in August, after peak flowering.
Gretel determining the identity of individual Echinacea plants
at the scraped roadside at Riley’s. The scraped gravel was piled in the ditches. Some plants in the ditches were buried and I expect that many of them will die. There will probably be a lot of weeds in and around those piles for the next few years (until the perennials take over again). Two images (above & below) of the piles of gravel deposited
in the ditch on the S side of the road at Riley’s.
Another highlight (no photos though): It was a pleasure to visit Staffanson. Gretel and I mapped the focal locations on Sunday and saw a patch of Cypripedium calceolus in flower (past prime). Almost every focal plant in the West unit (unburned) had spittlebug spittle on it. Almost none of the focal plants in the East unit (burned) had spit. We didn’t use the tripod to take photos. The camera didn’t attach well and the remotetrip feature isn’t ready yet. We’ll need to work on the tripod and practice using it. I think it holds great potential to speed up and improve our protocol. |
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