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Happy Labor Day from Team Echinacea! We made the most of the long weekend by doing lots of traveling. Danny went to Evanston to move things in before he moves there in a few weeks. He brought lots of the heads we harvested last week in an effort to keep up with the volunteer’s fast-paced processing of our harvest thus far! Meanwhile, Katherine, Ali, and I went up to Ely, MN to visit a friend of mine who works at a camp up there. The camp was hosting a music festival this weekend with artists like Lucy Michelle, Jeremy Messersmith, and The Pines. We were very excited to see the rocks, trees, and varied topography of the region which were all very different from what we’ve been experiencing in Douglas County. On Saturday morning we went mushroom hunting with Jeremy Messersmith, who happens to be a big mushroom enthusiast. Who knew! Later that day we went paddle-boarding and kayaking on the lake, which was really fun. Then we watched the concert! Super good. We capped off the day with some square-dancing with our fellow concert-goers. A great day. Sunday was similar, with more awesome music in the afternoon. We drove back today taking a scenic route through some good Minnesota towns I hadn’t been to before like Hibbing, Grand Rapids, and Akeley, which is the birthplace of Paul Bunyan. Danny is still on his way back from Chicago now. Stuart will be working at the Garden for the week, so it’s just us kids here in charge of getting everything done this week. There’ll be lots of harvesting to do in the experimental plots as well as plenty of refinding the seedlings that Team Echinacea has kept track of over the past 6 years in the remnants.
 Us and Paul
Here is everything that happened this weekend:
– We said goodbye to Gina as she heads home to New York for a week before starting class at Carleton. We miss you already Gina! Now there are only four of us living at the Town Hall.
– After we dropped Gina off at the Perkins where she caught her shuttle to the airport, Ali, Katherine, and I sobbed in the car for a while and then we went grocery shopping at Cub.
– We went back to Town Hall and congratulated ourselves on having already accomplished two items on our to-do list (drop off Gina, go grocery shopping) and rewarded ourselves by taking naps.
– Ali’s friend from school came and visited, and we went camping at Glacial Lakes State Park. Lots of nice prairie there! And lots of purple coneflower patches and magnets available for purchase at the park office. The only bad part about the park was that the interpretive signs had pictures of “native prairie plants” and had Echinacea purpurea listed.
– Ali taught me how to knit, and I made a yellow rectangle.
– Danny went to Northfield for the weekend and brought us back donuts from the Fireside Apple Orchard! Wow! Tis the season!
– I tried to make peanut butter but I burnt the peanuts so it was really gross. Ali made cucumber bread and it was pretty good; we ranked it 6 out of 10 would make again and 10 out of 10 would consume if starving.
– Watched the new T. Swift music video for the song “Wildest Dreams“: really beautiful scenery; she wears a brunette-wig and I’m kind of undecided about that.
It was a good weekend. Can’t believe it’s almost September!
On our day off, some members of Team Echinacea went up to Glendalough state park to camp for a night. It was a great weekend because lots of things could have gone wrong, but we were super lucky and almost nothing did! For example, one of our tents didn’t have a rainfly, but then Stuart and Gretel let us borrow one of theirs! Thanks Stuart and Gretel! But we didn’t even end up sleeping in it—more about that later!! We also didn’t have a reservation, but it turned out that there was a no-show at a campsite, so we got that one! The lady at the park office told us that if a person named Nathan showed up, we would have to tell him that we had taken his campsite, but fortunately Nathan never showed up. Confrontation avoided! It was a canoe-in site, but lacking a canoe, we hiked there. Thanks for carrying the cooler, Gina!
We ate sandwiches and then went to the water. We decided to try to swim across the lake even though we agreed we weren’t very good at estimating distance across water. Then we swam across the lake! The water was really nice and it only took 45 minutes. We saw a loon and a bald eagle while we were swimming. Katherine and Gina walked to meet us at the beach on the other side. Next, we all spent a good 10-15 minutes giggling in the waves by the shore because we were happy and probably a little dehydrated. Then we realized that the beach we were on was being rented out for a family reunion and everyone around us was probably related and wondering who the heck we were, especially because they would have been able to see us bobbing across the lake for the past half hour! Thanks for sharing the beach, Will family!
 Intrepid swimmers bob along swimmingly Next we walked back to our campsite. We built a fire in about 15 minutes which Katherine thought was kind of a while, but many of the rest us agreed was “about as fast as we had ever started a fire before.” We had corn and hot dogs and took a lot of pictures of the fire, hot dogs, and the sunset (see example below).
See similar pic on Gina’s instagram Once it got dark we started looking at the stars and were doing that when two park rangers showed up. “Hey folks just wanted to let you know that your tents are a little bit off the tent pad and also there is a storm a-brewing in North Dakota that has hurricane-force winds and golf-ball sized hail and it’s heading this way,” was approximately what he said. We mumbled responses and then he said, “Tell you what, the folks at the yurt campsite vacated the premises early so I’ll go ahead and leave that unlocked so you can go there if things get dicey.” So we said, “Thanks officer!” and after several minutes of discussion we decided that the opportunity to sleep in a yurt was too good to pass up, especially with the possibility of inclement weather. So then we got to sleep in the yurt and it was warm and dry which was nice because it sounded like a pretty gnarly storm!
The yurt was very sturdy and well furnished. We woke up and took some more pics (see below). Next we ate breakfast at a nice little place in Battle Lake, which we all agreed was “a really cute town.” Then Ali drove us home and we made it back to Town Hall safe and sound! What a great and lucky weekend!
Da yurt!
 A froggy friend visits Taylor during measuring today. The team went out to the remnant sites this morning to assess phenology. Of the 1863 flowering heads from the remants this summer, only 26 are still flowering. Of these, 20 are in their “end flowering” phase, which means they only have a few days of flowering left. We finished doing all phenology, including p1 and p2 before 11 this morning. This is quite a contrast to a couple of weeks ago when pure phenology was an all-day job. We even had some time before lunch to clip sumac and Salix, two woody species which have crept into p1. At lunch we said goodbye to Stuart, who is flying to Baltimore for the ESA Annual Meeting. He will give a talk about the Echinacea Project tomorrow. After lunch we did a bit more land management work, pulling thistle and sweet clover from p8. After that much of the group headed back to p1 for more measuring. Today we measured plants that were planted in ’96, ’97, ’98. We contemplated the fact that many these plants are older than Will, Taylor, and Abby. Ali, Matt, and Ben went to Hegg to work on Ben’s independent project. They were testing different methods of seed collection (hand harvesting and using a seed sucker) on Galium. They came back with lots of seeds! This week we will continue measuring plants in p1 and working on independent projects.
We started off today with freshly baked scones and a visit from Steve Ellis, a local beekeeper. Steve is currently involved in a court case, Ellis vs. EPA, which seeks to increase regulation on the use of pesticides, especially neonicotinoids, when used in areas where bees forage. He told us about how neonicotinoids are nearly ubiquitous in today’s agricultural system, coated on corn, soybean, and many other crops. These are systemic pesticides which means that the chemicals are taken up by all parts of the plant. Anything that eats the plant—including the pollen that the plant produces—is exposed to the chemicals. Although they are basically safe for humans, they cause mortality to bees in high dosages. Even more troubling, though, is that they frequently have sublethal effects on bees even at very low concentrations. This can compromise their ability to forage, overwinter, effectively provide pollination, and reproduce. Steve emphasized that there is a lot that we don’t know about the effects of neonicotinoids, such as their long-term effects in the ecosystem. Steve is very active as an advocate for bee health, spending much of his time talking to legislators and people like us to spread the word about what is happening to bees. He told us that one of the most important things that we can do are to buy organic food, which will reduce both our own and the bees’ exposure to chemicals.
Local beekeeper and activist Steve Ellis visited this morning We finished up some phenology before lunch. It was too windy here (gusting up to 40 mph) to do crosses for the q3 experiment, so instead we did more phenology (less to do tomorrow!) and sent teams out with the GPS units to make sure the maps we are using include all of our plants. Tomorrow we will hopefully be able to do a lot of crossing. We will also do some more GPS surveying and work on independent projects.
 Ben Lee (2015); ballpoint pen on notebook paper It was a good Saturday of phenology and fun for Team Echinacea! A group of us braved the morning fog and went out to our remnant sites to assess phenology. Lots of plants have reached or are nearing the end of their flowering time already. Later in the day we went swimming, played bananagrams, and drew blind contour drawings of each other.
This weekend, Danny and I have been working the ongoing project assessing compatibility between Echinacea individuals within remnants. On Friday, we went to Loeffler’s Corner and randomly selected 10 flowering plants; these are our focal plants. We do four crosses on each focal plant, with pollen from each of the crosses being placed on four or 5 bracts of the focal plants. We can tell if the cross is compatible by seeing if the styles shrivel after receiving pollen; if they do, they’re compatible, but if the styles persist, then the cross was between two plants that are not compatible.
For this study, we cross each focal plant with its nearest flowering neighbor, its furthest flowering neighbor, a plant that flowered early (i.e. one that is just ending flowering), and a plant that flowered late (i.e. one that just started flowering). To keep track of the crosses, we paint the bracts of the focal plant different colors which correspond to the cross that the style will receive: near, far, early, or late. We paint bracts corresponding to male florets; the next day, they will be styles, and we will be able to do the crosses. After we paint, we cover each focal flower with a pollinator exclusion bag so that we can be sure that no other pollen is introduced.
On the next day, Saturday, the styles of our focal plants emerged. We collected pollen from the various pollen donors and used a toothpick to perform the crosses, carefully placing pollen onto the styles identified by their painted bracts. We cover the focal flowers back up with the pollinator exclusion bags and wait one day to see if the styles shrivel.
This morning, Danny and I went back out to Loeffler’s to check on style shriveling. Here are the results!
| |
Compatible |
Incompatible |
Inconclusive |
| Nearest neighbor |
9 |
1 |
0 |
| Farthest neighbor |
7 |
2 |
1 |
| Early flowering |
7 |
1 |
2 |
| Late flowering |
9 |
1 |
0 |
Here I’m considering a cross compatible if 75% or more of the styles shriveled, incompatible if 25% or less shriveled, and inconclusive if it is anywhere in between. We’ll go back tomorrow to check on crosses that weren’t either 100% shriveled or not shriveled and see if any more styles have shriveled in that time.
Hopefully we’ll be able to repeat this process on several more remnant populations this coming week!
Yesterday, members of Team Echinacea went on a field trip to the Pembina Trail Preserve, a huge reserve of land owned by the Nature Conservancy between Fertile and Crookston, MN. Gretel has been working on a project there looking at the effects of different management techniques on the western prairie fringed orchid (Platanthera praeclara) for many years, and we helped out by counting and mapping flowering orchids in two experimental plots.
We got an early start, leaving from the Hjelm house at 6 AM. Everyone fell asleep on the drive up except for Gretel and Lea, who were driving. It was already 80 degrees when we got to Fertile around 9 AM. It was fun to be in a different type of prairie: the Pembina Trail Preserve is located in the Red River Valley so the landscape is very flat. It was much wetter than the prairies we study—we saw species like mountain mint, sedges, sandhill cranes, and snipes, which thrive in the moist environment.
 Western fringed prairie orchid We counted orchids in one plot in the morning, working systematically in teams: two people searched for orchids and counted the number of flowers on each plant, one person kept track of where we were on the grid by finding wooden posts with coordinates, and one person followed behind with a GPS unit, shooting points at each plant. In the first plot, we found 301 orchids. This is a lot more flowering orchids than there have been the past couple of years; two years ago there weren’t any!
Next, we ate lunch in the grass before walking a mile to the second plot. Little did we know that we were in for a very full afternoon of orchid counting! True quotes from day include: “Wow there are so many orchids”, “Sulu [the GPS unit] can’t find a connection, space weather must be bad,” “this post doesn’t have coordinates on it,” “I can’t find any posts,” “I can’t believe how many orchids there are,” “I might not like orchids anymore,” and (in the field at 5PM) “the ice cream shop in Fertile is closing.”
 Sulu takes a time out by the tree But all complaining aside, we felt very accomplished having found 537 more orchids, bringing our daily total to 838. Wow! This is a lot more than we were expecting. Just based on impressions from yesterday, it seemed like the haying management treatment—when an area is mowed at the end of the flowering season and the grass collected for hay—promoted flowering. Maybe the disturbance helps to distribute the orchid seeds.
 Happy to be finished with a full day of work! We all felt refreshed after Gretel bought us F’real milkshakes and Gatorade at the gas station in Fertile. Then we drove to the pelican-themed metropolis of Pelican Rapids and ate dinner at Taqueria Escobar, a Mexican family restaurant. Quotes from dinner include: “This is a lot of food,” “Yum,” “You know, I actually do like orchids,” and “Today turned out to be a really nice day.”
In August, Gretel will go back to Pembina in August to see how many of the orchids produce seeds. Stay tuned for updates!
Today marks our second Friday of the summer field season and also the beginning of flowering season for Echinacea. We spent the day working in teams to track phenology in the remnants, and found that several plants have already started producing pollen. Woohoo!
 Gina records the status of plants at East Riley. We can estimate how many days a plant has been flowering because Echinacea florets follow a specific pattern of development:
On the first day of flowering, anthers emerges from above the bract that subtends (or supports) the floret. The anther is the male, pollen-producing part of the flower. Flowering occurs from the outermost florets of the Echinacea heads and moves inwards; on the first day of flowering, only florets in the outer ring of florets will produce anthers. On the second day of flowering, styles (the female, pollen-receiving part of the plant) emerge from the florets that had anthers the day before. Also, florets in the second row of florets could start producing anthers. On the following day, these florets will have their styles emerge, and the pattern continues.
Today we learned how to identify anthers and styles. We caught most of the flowering plants on their first or second day of flowering, but we estimated that some of them had already begun 3 or 4 days ago based on the number of rows that had already had anthers and styles.
 Here’s a plant on it’s first day of flowering. The light blue arrow points at an anther. Matt’s wife, Melinda, and the Brazilian exchange student that they are hosting, Thiago, ate lunch with us and brought a strawberry pie with cool-whip and blueberries. Yum!! And then at the end of the day Hattie and Per brought out a surprise treat for us! It was an original recipe: ginger-stuffed marshmallows coated in chocolate and rolled in graham crackers and ginger. How lucky are we??
 Scrumptious delicacies courtesy of Hattie and Per! Yum! We ended a little early today because we were scared off by a little rain and ominous-looking storm clouds rolling in from the west. It turned out that we didn’t get much of the storm and we went swimming in Elk Lake after work.
 The view of the Tower Site from the driveway. On the left is Highway 27 and on the right you can see the bottom on the tower. Ben Lee, interviewed by Amy Waananen
AW: So Ben, tell me about where you are.
BL: Well, I am standing here looking at the site which is between the microwave tower and Highway 27. The tower is at the top of a pretty large hill. The cars are whizzing at by on the highway just south of where we’re standing, probably going at least 60 mph. The site itself runs along a fairly steep hill that is probably around 30 meters wide, sloping down from a line of spruces planted around the tower to the road.
AW: What does it look like?
BL: It looks a lot like any other roadside in the area; I notice that there are a lot of invasives, especially as compared to some of the other, more managed, sites that we’ve seen like Staffanson Prairie Preserve and Hegg Lake. Brome and Poa are the dominant grasses here, and I can see species like bird’s foot trefoil, alfalfa, and red clover as well.
AW: Uh oh. Any native species?
BL: A few! I see a native pea plant and yarrow flowering. Hopefully there are some Echinacea angustifolia in there too, but we can’t see them yet. Plus, I can see some bumble bees flying over the tops of the grasses and I hear birds in the grove of trees on the north side of the hill.
AW: What do you think the history of the landscape is?
BL: I imagine that there has been quite a bit of construction around here. You can see how they shaped this hill to lower the grade of the road, and there was probably quite a bit of disturbance from installing the tower. There is a strip of land that is probably about 3 feet wide running from the road up towards the tower where vegetation looks sparse or stunted. I wonder if there is an underground wire there. Other than that though, looking around I can see all the undulating hills in the area and can see how large of an impression glaciers left in the area.
AW: What is your overall impression of the site?
BL: Well, it is a small patchof grassland in the middle of a busy area. The lack of native prairie species is probably due to both the disturbances due to construction and the lack of management to promote prairie species—it is unlikely that this particular spot ever gets burned being so close to both the road and the tower. Although I don’t see any Echinacea here right now, I hope to see some later in the summer. Overall, this site seems characteristic of much of the potential habitat for Echinacea today—fragmented and literally shaped by human influences. It’ll be interesting to see how it is similar and dissimilar to prairie remnants such as Staffanson Prairie Preserve andprairie restoration sites like Hegg Lake.
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