The aphid addition and exclusion experiment was started in 2011 by Katherine Muller. The original experiment included 100 plants selected from exPt01 that were each assigned to have aphids either added or excluded across multiple years. The intention is to assess the impact of the specialist herbivore Aphis echinaceae on Echinacea fitness.
In 2024, 41 of the original 100 plants were alive, two of which flowered. However, we did not see any aphids anywhere while measuring exPt01. We have not conducted fieldwork for this experiment since 2022, when team members Emma Reineke and Kennedy Porter were in charge of the experiment and did not find any aphids in exPt01, so they introduced a new population of Aphid echinaeceae into the plot. Learn more in the 2022 summer aphid update.
- Start year: 2011
- Location: exPt01
- Overlaps with: Phenology and fitness in P1
- Data collected:
- Plant survival and measurements were recorded as part of our annual surveys in P1 and eventually will be found in our SQL database.
- Samples collected:
- 2 heads from plants included in this experiment are at the Chicago Botanic Garden awaiting processing: AD-1728 and AZ-1744 in the exPt01 2024 batch
- Products:
- Andy Hoyt’s poster presented at the Fall 2018 Research Symposium at Carleton College
- 2016 paper by Katherine Muller and Stuart Wagenius on aphids and foliar herbivory damage on Echinacea
- 2015 paper by Ruth Shaw and Stuart Wagenius on fitness and demographic consequences of aphid loads
You can read more about the aphid addition and exclusion experiment, as well as links to prior flog entries mentioning the experiment, on the background page for this experiment.
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