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Today we kicked off week two of three of our externship. After a restful weekend checking out downtown Chicago, everyone’s back to work on their respective projects. While Belle’s been busily researching the lab’s collection of bees, Jackie and Audrey have been hard at work trying to process all of our remnant seed heads so we can do some data analysis. It turns out we have a lot more heads to process than we thought! With the entire process—cleaning the heads, scanning them, counting the number of achenes, randomizing samples for x-raying, and x-raying for the presence of seeds– each head takes a long time to get completely ready. So, we’ve decided to scale back our analysis to just randomly selected flowers for now, instead of looking at a random sample as well as heads with extremes of early and late flowering times. Audrey’s been busy trying to get all the scanned heads ready for x-raying, so lots of selecting random samples and labeling of clear plastic bags. Jackie’s been busy cleaning—even testing out the Optivisor to see if magnifying the heads speeds things up:
We’ve also found four more larval friends! We’ve gotten around 10, now.
Here’s the poster that Jackie and Audrey made in their GIS class.
Things are truckin’ along in the lab. Belle has kept on organizing and categorizing the bees, making slow but steady progress. Audrey and Jackie have kept on cleaning seed heads, and finding a significant amount of those hungry, yet unidentified little larvae. In fact, the two have found more larvae than has been found on any seed heads for the past ten years. Needless to say, something interesting definitely happened with this insects’ population this past growing season. Everyone is pretty excited to see the final distribution of seed heads damaged with characteristic chewed up achenes. Audrey and Jackie, while they are certainly excited to try to solve the larval mystery, are doing their best to mitigate and keep careful track of the effect this predation might have on their seed set data.
Hopefully, by trying to raise multiple larvae under varied environmental conditions, the team can get a couple to live and develop into adult stages, where they’d be much more easily identified.
Fun fact: the Echinacea Project has collected over 1000 bee specimen and each is more beautiful than the next, especially when viewed from under a high-powered microscope. My task over the three weeks of my externship is to inventory and organize these lovely little pollinators and then create a database on the Echinacea webpage that project members can refer to in the field when they observe a pollinator visiting a purple coneflower.
So far, no easy task! Most of the bees have been previously identified, but some remain nameless and nomadic, species-less and in need of a home. Thus, a crash-course in bee identification was necessary. I think I’ve gotten pretty good at, if not identifying native bee species, then plowing headfirst into identifying native bee species and confidently writing down the complete wrong answer. Notable characteristics that are friends when identifying native bees include the colors of the mandibles (not the “jaw”, Belle) and the color of the little fuzzy hairs on the top of his or her head. More difficult characteristics whose identification I have yet to master include the specific color of the hair in between the T3 and T2 apical bands, above the rim but sometimes moving towards the center, and not characteristically white. Honestly, it’s Greek to me at this point and when this is all done I have a bone to pick with whoever wrote out these characteristics on DiscoverLife, but I hope to learn the language over these next three weeks. The fun part is that each bee is special in its own persnickety little way, which allows for little battles with these little beasts all day long as I try to reason with them. Currently, I am not winning.
In the next few weeks I hope to wrangle these bees into their place and get them neatly organized and classified. Hopefully I will post some close-up views of these hard-working ladies and gents from under the microscope soon, but it seems the lights have had enough today and need a bit of a break before turning on again. But I bee-lieve in them.
 Jurassic Bee (or a “bee killer”)
Halfway through our first week of the externship, things have started getting exciting! While Belle has been busy cataloguing, Jackie and Audrey have made some new friends: larvae we’ve found living in the seed heads. The mystery larvae are unfortunately eating the achenes we’re trying to collect, but to make the most out of a bad situation, we’ve been collecting larvae, too! The count in our petri dish is about 8, and growing! Most of these have been found by Audrey, who in a twist of cruel irony is the most startled to find them. The larvae are pretty big relative to the head and easy to spot (they’re pale pink and the heads are dark brown), but we still haven’t figured out how to predict which achene we pull out will have a larva behind it. We still have a lot more heads to clean and find larvae in, so we hope to find out where they’re coming from and maybe even see what they turn into.
Pictured below: Jackie and Audrey’s first larval finds.
Hello! I have created a webpage that displays the different parts of an Echinacea angustifolia seedhead. It is available at: https://echinaceaproject.org/background/our-study-species/echinacea-seedheads/. The page defines the parts of a seedhead and many of the types of chaff found while cleaning heads, with pictures!
Monday the 30th of November marked the start of two exciting new externship projects in the lab. All three undergraduate students are from Carleton College. Belle Kinder is taking inventory and creating a database for bee specimens. Audrey Lothspeich and Jackie Culotta are working on quantifying and analyzing the seed sets from various remnant populations.
On the first day, the externs were oriented to the lab and the Plant Science Building’s facilities. They learned the basics of Echinacea reproduction from an orientation lesson with Stuart. After listening to a presentation by a community biologist about the relative importance of intraspecies variation and species turnover in accounting for total population change (and eating lunch) they got right to work.
All externs discussed with their associated long-term interns (Belle with Amy, and Danny with Audrey and Jackie) about the the specifics of their projects, and their desired outcomes. After that, Belle set about deciding what needed adjustment with the current collection of specimens. Having an action plan is always important! Audrey and Jackie got right into dissecting and cleaning their first seed heads.
Stay tuned for 3 more exciting weeks of externship!
This summer, Gina Hatch and Abby VanKempen continued a project examining the effects of aphid herbivory on Echinacea angustifolia survival and fitness. This year they found 70 of the original 100 study plants (33 addition and 37 exclusion). Starting July 14th going until August 20th, Abby and Gina visited plants twice each week for a total of 12 visits per plant. On each visit, the plant received its treatment: either adding aphids from other plants if it was in the addition group or removing all aphids if it was in the exclusion group. At the end of the summer, Abby and Gina used the number of leaves with chew marks and holes (signs of foliar herbivory) to quantify herbivory. There was not a significant difference in herbivory between the two treatment groups, where herbivory was measured as the proportion of damaged leaves (p = 0.74). On September 14th and October 15th, Ali Hall took measurements of senescence including number of brown and purple basal and cauline leaves. These have not yet been incorporated into an analysis.
Read more posts about this experiment here.
Start year: 2011
Location: P1
Overlaps with: Phenology and fitness in P1
Products: Fitness measurements were collected during our annual assessment of fitness in P1. A list of focal plants and addition/exclusion datasheets are located in Gina Hatch’s Dropbox folder and can be found here. Gina created a poster and presented at Carleton’s summer research symposium and her poster can be found here. Abby plans to present at the Elbow Lake Library. The senescence data can be found here.
Gina made a poster for Carleton’s summer research symposium. The symposium happened a while ago but you can relive the experience by looking at her poster!
Effects of the specialist aphid, Aphis echinaceae, on overall herbivory of Echinacea angustifolia
You can find it here.
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