Katherine here.
Most of the Echinacea crew arrived on Sunday. The week has gotten off to a running start. Here are some pictures from our first few days in action:
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Last summer I conducted a biweekly survey of aphids and ants in the common garden, an experimental prairie restoration containing Echinacea from various remnant populations. I was interested in the spatial distribution of aphids and ants within and across years. This year I plan to scale down my survey to once a month, beginning next Friday. Here’s a detailed protocol: I couldn’t make the Midwest Ecology and Evolution Conference, but I made a poster. It describes preliminary results from an aphid addition/exclusion experiment I conducted in the summer of 2011. Specifically, it examines the question of whether aphid infestation influences the presence of leaf damage by other herbivores. It’s been a busy week for everybody. Plants are blooming, pollen is shedding, and everyone is dashing about madly to catch the field season before it passes us by. I have been running around like a chicken with its head cut off trying to get ready for my aphid addition/exclusion experiment. Everyone has been a wonderful help setting up cages in this sweltering heat. My goal for this week is to finish my first round of experimental treatments: exclusion on Thursday and addition on Friday. Before then, I need to finish setting up nets and teach everyone how to wrangle aphids. Here is a protocol I wrote up to assist the teaching process and the data sheets I mention in the protocol. These are works in progress, so any feedback is appreciated. AphidExclusionCollectionProtocol2011.doc aphidcollectionoutsideExpt.xls aphidinfestation.xls Katherine I wrote this up last week, but neglected to post it on the flog. Here is a detailed protocol for the 2011 recruitment searches. See Wagenius et al. 2011* for a description of the seedling recruitment study. *Wagenius, S., A.B. Dykstra, C.E. Ridley, and R.G. Shaw. 2011. Seedling recruitment in the long-lived perennial, Echinacea angustifolia: A 10-year experiment. Restoration Ecology. I made some updates to my project proposal. You can read them here: Today we surveyed a patch of the common garden for aphid infestation. I chose my survey area based on observations I made Wednesday morning, during my initial search for aphids. I wanted my square to include at least one heavily-infested plant with ant domatia (dirt structures that ants build to cultivate aphids). Otherwise my choice of positions and rows was random. Here is a description of today’s survey. This weekend I will go over the data and make a map of aphid infestation. Because it’s still early in the season for aphids, I hope to repeat this survey one or more times this summer to look for spatial and temporal patterns of infestation. Thank you to the Echinacea team members for your diligent data gathering. Aphid survey protocol 1June2001.doc I’m happy to say the survey went smoothly. Everyone seemed to have an easy time recognizing aphid life stages and ant domatia. My only goof-up was accidentally assigning the same row to two people, leaving us one row short, but thankfully we caught it in time to finish up before a thunderstorm hit. Next time I will be more careful about my row assignments. I would like to repeat this survey several times throughout the summer–maybe once every two weeks. Here are some thoughts I have based on my observations in the common garden: 1. We have observed that plants with heavy infestations early in the season tend to have wrinkly, stunted leaves–possibly due to aphid overwintering. I suspect that these plants may serve as aphid source populations that spread to surrounding host plants. It will be interesting to see whether aphid infestation is more prevalent among plants nearby heavy aphid infestations (i.e. plants with all three aphid life stages, wrinkly leaves, and ant domatia). 2. I noticed that on plants with small infestations, ants seemed to be carrying away gravid females. Perhaps ants play a role in mitigating population-wide aphid infestation by concentrating aphids on a few heavily-infested plants. This survey won’t tell me much about the role of ants, but I am curious to see whether some plants lose their aphids throughout the season. Thanks again everyone for helping me gather my first data set! Here is a more detailed project proposal. This one focuses on what I want to accomplish this summer: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1PqYExtOCkmHzcLkLP3bS04_4X9OlVSZ5pjSZEiV-xp4/edit?hl=en_US&authkey=COLOz7cO Please let me know if the link doesn’t work. Here is a rough proposal for my Master’s research. edit: fixed the link. -josh |
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