Nina here! Today, Trevor continued cleaning his Solidago heads, which have very small and delicate achenes. However, because his achenes are so small and fluffy, they tend to fly everywhere, including onto the bread that Trevor was eating! He cleaned 28 heads today, which was very impressive. Meanwhile, I finished re-checking my Echinacea heads for any stray achenes that were stubbornly clinging to the heads and proceeded to scanning the achenes for counting. While I was re-checking, I found quite a few miscellaneous bees and spiders, some of which are pictured below. Also, a picture of one of my scans below – for this site, the achenes needed to be separated according the the location that they came from on the head, so ‘top,’ ‘mid,’ ‘bot,’ and ‘other’ achenes were segregated. Next week, I hope to start randomizing my samples for X-raying and counting the scans that I took. Trevor hopes to finish counting and move on to X-raying next week as well.

We also had a lab meeting today to discuss a draft of a paper on Echinacea pollination, specifically analyzing the number of pollinators over the course of the season as well as type of pollinator and quality of pollination. The paper had some interesting (and confusing!) results, so it was nice to discuss the draft with others from the lab and look at the feedback that the draft received from reviewers.