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Greg and I have been collecting plants and pressing them. I am doing a plant collection with plants mainly from landfill for one of my classes next year at McGill in Plant Systematics. Greg is collecting specimens of anything that co-flowers with Echinacea and making slides with the pollen from each specimen to compare with the pollen found on the pollinators and styles from pollinator competition experiments. Greg, here is a site with information on collecting plants from the Missouri Botanic Gardens
Here is a document from my class that also describes field collection techniques:
HELPFUL HINTS2010.doc
I also made a drying box for the pressed plants, which is almost finished…
This post is long overdue! I thought I would give a little update on what I’ve been up to here at the Chicago Botanic Garden.
So to remind those who may have forgotten who I am and what my project is all about.. My name is Andrea. I attend McGill University where I study botany (with Allegra!) and over the past two years I’ve developed a very strong and deep DEEP love for life in the soil. Don’t get me wrong, I love studying plants, but at this phase of my life soil organisms (namely fungi) dominate. It started with an Introduction to Fungi course I took two years ago that involved a series of guided and independent mushroom forays and culminated in the production of a mycological portfolio. I then took a biology of fungi course that was much more thorough and only confirmed for me just how awesome fungi really are. Last summer I was lucky enough to have the chance to work as an REU intern with Louise Egerton-Warburton, soil scientist at the Garden. My research looked at how microbial communities respond to buckthorn invasion and subsequent restoration. I’m back this summer to continue research on that project and as well to start looking at the mycorrhizal communities associated with the Echinacea populations in the remnants of interest in Minnesota.
The main goal of my experiment is to see if there is a relationship between plant genotype and mycorrhizal community. At the beginning of the summer Stuart helped me select nine families in the ’97 common garden and from each family around 9 individual plants were randomly chosen.To collect the mycorrhizal fungi I use mesh baggies that have two polycarbonate membranes secured at the bottom. One of these membranes I will stain and permanently fix onto slides for the purposes of determining hyphal length. This will give me an overall idea of mycorrhizal density and colonization. Hopefully I will have time to extract DNA from the other membrane to get a closer look at who’s really there.
To install the bags, I basically wedge the bag carefully into the ground near the roots of select plants so that the membranes sit at least 4 cm below the surface. Over time, the mycorrhizal fungi growing near the roots will run across these membranes and have no trouble meandering through its pores. Little do they know that it’s a trap!! Around each plant I placed one bag and waited about three weeks. Recently, I retrieved those bags and I’ve spent the past few days making slides. I promised to post pictures so here are a couple exhibiting some spores and hyphae!
(Image taken with 40X objective)
For some reason it won’t let me load more than one photo so I will try again later.
More updates coming soon!
-Andrea
This week we are going to make big dents in CG measurements and our independent projects. We will measure the CG MWF morning and TTH afternoon. We’ll start T & Th morning with Phenology assessments and end off each morning with time to work on independent projects. Afternoons on MWF will be devoted to independent projects.
Be ready 8:30 Monday morning–with sunscreen on & visors synced–for a pep talk (it’ll be about efficiency & the well-oiled machine)!
day AM PM
Monday measure CG ind. proj.
Tuesday phenology & i.p. measure CG
Wednesday measure CG ind. proj.
Thursday phenology & i.p. measure CG
Friday measure CG ind. proj.
Saturday phenology & off off
I was glad to participate in assessing floral phenology Wed morning and, with Amy, checking to resolve uncertainties remaining from this year’s monitoring of the first recruitment experiment (not to mention a very fun lunch with the team!). We sampled tissue from closely neighboring rosettes, where it isn’t clear whether they are the same or different plants, for eventual molecular analysis in Chicago by Jennifer and her team. Resolution of those plant identities should certainly help reduce the problem of counts of survivors *increasing* between censuses. But, in retrospect, I wondered whether the info we recorded was crystal-clear in terms of how this year’s counts should be adjusted, depending on the outcome of the IDing, particularly for the zones where many seedlings were recorded. When the remaining double-checking is done, it would be good to keep this in mind…
Of the many, many other terrific things that I’m excited are being accomplished, I’ll just comment that I’m happy to see Megan’s post that she has sampled pollen and stored it in different conditions to check its long-term viability. Finding a way to keep pollen viable for a month to a year would pave the way for experiments I thought up while observing pollinators out at LF on July 7. I see that Megan noted the amount of pollen available for that sample wasn’t large, so it would be great if another set of samples could be taken, also so other plants are represented.
This two-part entry includes one observation about pollination that struck me odd. I had a floral head (A) at Loeffler’s corner and as Agopostamas texanus approached – it stopped – flew backwards and away – and visited others nearby (all Echinacea). Did the presence of ants on the head – around the anthers have anything to do with the “I’ll just come back later” actions of the bee? Has anyone else observed a head NOT get visited even though it was ripe with pollen because of the presence of ants?
My second half is simply noting that a calico cat and two large kittens were at the end of the common garden yesterday as I left about 4PM. The mother slunk away and the gold/white kitten watched me while the other kitten mostly white/ some black was trying to consume a chipmunk! Are these cats known to inhabit the area?
Gretel- KJ’s
Mimi- Railroad Crossing
Allegra- Landfill East
Stuart- Staffanson
Amy- Steven’s Approach
Amanda- Yellow Orchid Hill
Daniel- Aanenson
Kate- Riley
Caroline- On 27
Greg- Loeffler’s Corner
See you guys at 7:30ish at Hjelm House!
xoxo,
Amanda
We have made a few changes to the protocol for tomorrow’s FINAL outing for pollinator observation and collection:
1) DO NOT capture syrphid flies!
2) If you observe a small common syrphid fly (Family: Syrphidae, Sphaerophoria sp.) on your Echinacea head, make a note that one SCSF was observed. Here are some photos of syrphid flies:
http://echinacea.umn.edu/insects/images/poll2005vin1948side.jpg
http://echinacea.umn.edu/insects/images/poll2005vin1927top.jpg
http://echinacea.umn.edu/insects/images/poll2005vin1927front.jpg
Here’s a video that might help:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkjPfAMGmiw&NR=1
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As for pollinator collection and analysis…
We’ve gone out collecting three times now (tomorrow is the fourth and final day), and we have about 140 Echinacea insect visitors in vials in the freezer. Here is my protocol for making slides and labeling specimens:
1) Remove vial from the freezer and allow insect to thaw
2) Cut a very small (2mm cubed) piece of agar and situate it in the middle of a slide.
3) Remove the insect from the tube and dab and sweep every surface of the body across the agar cube. This is intended to simulate the amount of pollen that might be transferred to Echinacea styles during a visit.
4) Set the insect aside on Styrofoam.
5) Sweep the inside of the vial with the agar cube for any loose pollen.
6) Place a cover slip atop the agar cube and put the slide on the edge of a hotplate on LOW heat. Watch the slide carefully and remove it when the agar is soft but not melted (once melting starts, it will quickly boil and create bubbles in the slide).
7) Pin the insect (for identification if it is an unknown species, or quick-n-casual for a known species) and pin it with a new one letter, three number code.
8) Label the slide with the vial code and the specimen code.
Photos:
I photograph the slides on the same day as I make them so that the agar doesn’t dry out before the photo. To sample the slides, I have generated random pairs of numbers from 1 to 22 (inclusive). The cover slips are 22 x 22 mm and I use the ruler on the microscope to scroll to the randomly selected “plots” from one corner of the cover slip. From there, I take the photo at 40x. I take ten photos for each slide, and sometimes take more than one photo per plot if I capturing all of the pollen grains requires multiple focuses.
I will post some photos of this process soon, so hang in there!
As always, feel free to leave questions or comments.
Thanks!!
Amanda
So, there has been a serious lack of pictures lately (aside from those awesome Stipa scans), so I am posting a bunch of pictures taken a while ago, just so you can see what we are up to:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/danrath/3727546804/
Amanda in her little corner of the farmhouse, doing voodoo with bees.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/danrath/3726738091/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/danrath/3726739525/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/danrath/3726736903/
Greg and Kate locked away in the Basement of Oppression
http://www.flickr.com/photos/danrath/3727538558/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/danrath/3727532876/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/danrath/3726727059/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/danrath/3727301314/
Berry Picking, starting with Caroline’s Gollum face. We have picked at least 20 buckets of berries from these people.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/danrath/3727297280/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/danrath/3726488747/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/danrath/3726486389/ – Aphids, the enemy.
Insects in the Common Garden that I found while searching for plants
http://www.flickr.com/photos/danrath/3726483267/
Mimi broadcasting Stipa grass
We spent most of yesterday collecting pollinators and measuring plants in the Common Garden. (It has never taken me 3 hours to go 30 metres before, but all the plants I measured seemed to be in the middle of a grass clump). I have also figured out a procedure for refinding plants in the transects, and it should not take very long to refind all of them. This is good, as I might be working by myself to do that.
On July 20th I collected pollen,separated into three microfuge tubes, from plant 36, 958. Tube #1 has been left at room temperature, #2 is in the refrigerator, and #3 is in the freezer. There wasn’t much pollen available, so I hope it’s enough to try some pollinations and see how long the pollen stays viable under the three treatments.
Apparently there is some question about what I have been doing lately. Daniel was partly right–data entry has been on my list. Remember checking the recruitment zones earlier this summer? And being rewarded with all those six packs? Well, there were some ambiguities in the data. I compiled a list 2009 zones to check.xls of all the things we need to check in the recruitment zones. Some of these (checking burn status) can be taken care of with a visit to the plot; other ambiguities may be cleared up by taking some tissue samples and sending them to Chicago for microsatellite analysis.
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