Another busy day for Team Echinacea! I started field work late this morning due to giving a talk at the virtual Evolution conference. Everything was pre-recorded, so it was great to enjoy listening to all the other talks in my session and learn about some new ideas related to gene flow. The title of my talk was “Outcrossing distance in space and time affects fitness in a long-lived perennial” — I’m planning to post the video on the Team Echinacea YouTube channel sometime soon so you can watch it anytime. While I was watching talks, the team was busy at work, doing phenology, shooting points, and nearly finishing flowering demo at all of the sites.
At lunch, we discussed team norms. Stuart floated the idea of turning the team norms into a blood pact sort of thing, but there was not much enthusiasm for the idea. It’s okay because one of our norms is that we want our work environment to be a “soft space” where everyone feels welcome to share their ideas, even if others don’t share the same opinion!
After lunch was the inaugural meeting of Team Dust. This is an exciting new initiative to investigate the effects of road dust on Echinacea. How much dust from gravel roads winds up landing on the plants on roadsides? Does this dust affect pollination or seed set? We intend to find out!
Here is a picture of several color-coordinated members of Team Dust.
Finally, we had our second official social gathering of the season. We ate bean burgers, air-fried fries, and (my personal favorite) Jean’s famous brownies! Delicious. We also drank and discussed several flavors of iced tea. Some of the words used to describe one of the teas included “turpentine”, “pine-sol”, “earthy”, and “savory”. Can you guess which one?
That’s all for now! Til next time,
Amy
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