Today Amy D. came up from the cites to help kick off sling refinds!
I had never done sling before, but I thought it was pretty cool. It’s kind of like if measuring and demo had a kid, because you have to measure all of the seedlings but also still find nearest neighbor. We were able to finish three sites today, East elk lake road, KJ’s, and south of golf course!
Amy D. and I on the hunt for seedlings!
This afternoon we worked on some p1 harvest as a team and Emma went off to work on her independent project.
It was a hot one out here today but we all made it out alive and are ready to get some more stuff done tomorrow!
Ohhh heyyyyyyy its your friendly Team Echinacea yearlong intern who found her hair brush under her bed after it being lost for at least three weeks, Mia Stevens.
Oh boy do we have some updates for the flog!
Yesterday was a tumultuous weather day out here in Dougy county. Approximately at 4:30 am the thunder and rain began, this was some serious not messing around rain. I couldn’t sleep through it. Then at 6 there was the loudest thunder crack you have ever heard in your life. All of Andes crew jumped 6” in the air in shock. Then as we moseyed out of bed, we realized that not quite all of the lights were turning on. As we slightly began to panic about breakfast, the refrigerator, morning cups of tea, etc. Lea came to the rescue and checked the circuit breaker and fixed it all! Yay real adults! However, the one thing that did not turn back on and still hasn’t is the Wifi 🙁
We set off to Hjelm for a morning Zoom to learn about this awesome new mapping function made by Jared. The rain was still coming, enough to make even me drive the speed limit on 27. We were able to sneak in some remnant phenology, p1 phenology, demo, and even some p1 rechecks before lunch.
At lunch we enjoyed a wonderful vegan chocolate cake made by Jean, Penny, and Tulula to celebrate Jared’s week with the team. Then, the clouds came back with strong gusts of winds. We decided to call it quits on field work after lunch, and head over to Hoff house to empty it out.
Allie and I were working on some coding while double fisting halo pops when Stuart sent out a group me warning the group about the ongoing tornado warning! As two non-Midwesterners tornados are a fairly unknown phenomena, us New Yorkers know snow but that’s all about it natural disaster wise. Nothing too crazy happened in Hoffman, just some hard rain and wind. However, Lea reports it was raining sideways at Andes! But once we heard that John/Bonnie and Clyde are on tornado watch duty we instantly felt much safer. However, the lack of spotting the tornado in Evansville has made their further employment as tornado spotters come into question by some authorities, but not this one, we love you Clyde!
Clyde keeping watch!
After a recreating a scene from the Wizard of Oz we returned to Andes with a lifetime supply of halo pops. We went to bed with dreams of working Wi-Fi in the morning.
Our dreams were disappointed. We have spent the day finding ways to occupy ourselves without Wi-fi. Activities include but are not limited to: eating, drawing, cleaning your room, napping, becoming a dog groomer, reading, cleaning out your downloads folder, sunbathing, thinking about studying for the GRE, field work, and more eating.
Hopefully soon the Wifi can return and then I can choose to avoid answering emails instead of it being chosen for me.
Today started with some remnant phenology, the majority of the plants are done flowering at this point which means that the team can make short work of the task. Erin and Emma set off to do demo at north of golf, they staked to 134 different locs!
During lunch we celebrated Erin’s last day of field work with cake and chocolate!
Erin and cake!
In the afternoon the team continued to chip away at p1 measuring, with the help of the one and only Gretel Kiefer. Gretel came up from Chicago and got here at Thursday morning. We have all been highly appreciative of Gretel’s help over the past two days.
The team has been working on our bee ID skills here is an example of one of the bees found visiting Echinacea.
An Agapostemon virescens found by JVK id-ed by Alpha Whiskey
Yesterday the team took its biannual trip up to Pembina nature preserve and surveyed western fringed prairie orchid. There was many wildlife sightings including a few prairie chickens, a magpie, a deer and even a snipe!
The beautiful scenery of the wet prairie
After finding around 300 orchids we headed to Pelican Rapids to have dinner with our new friend Pelican Pete!
Darwin, Erin, Allie, and Emma posing with an orchid with 18 flowers!The team with our new friend Pete
All in all it was a good day and we had a good day but Gretel was truly missed.
Bur bye
Mia
Erin showing off part of her new fashion line that will drop in the fall
Today sure was a hot one out there today, well in comparison to how early in the season it is. The theme of the day was cleaning up. We started by cleaning up the flagging system in P1, this meant replacing most of the old flags from last year with clean crisp new ones. This is an extremely important task because it sets the ground work to collect data in P1 for the rest of the season.
A precision line of flags made by the team (photo creds to Emma)
Erin and Emma worked on rechecking some confusing data
points from last summer. By fixing these confusing points Emma and Erin were
able to pick up the data set.
A number of team members working on picking up G3 and started
on picking up Hjelm house.
Darwin practicing his road safety with his hi-vis hat (Photo creds to Erin)
Erin headed out to Near Town Hall to check on how the plants
are doing out there, she found what is thought to be the last known living
plant in the remnant. She reports that it is fairly large and is only a basal
plant this year and last flowered in 2018.
The Near Town Hall plant (photo creds to Erin)
We will keep cleaning so that we can have the most accurate and efficient season possible!
On Monday we were tasked with estimating the number of flowering plants in P2, one of the experimental plots. We set off to P2 and decided to count 1/3 of the plot. In P2 there are 80 rows of Echinacea plants and we decided to count every third row to get an estimate. Overall we did not find many flowering plants, only 70 flowering plants with a total of 89 heads. None of the plants were very far along in flowering and we will likely have some time before we have to start doing phenology.
The ever spectacular P2 view
Some of the non Echinacea native prairie plants like lead plant, little bluestem, veiny pea, prairie rose, and hoary puccoon. We also saw some invasive brome and alfalfa.
Hoary puccoonA bird’s nest found along the south end of the plot
My research interests are in how plants interact with their surrounding organisms and environment. And in this pollination biology perfectly is nesseled quite nicely. I have enjoyed using molecular work to follow where pollen is moving in populations of plants. I have been on Team Echinacea before (Summer 2018 and Team Echinacea East 2019) and I am looking forward to be back on the team and in the field!
Statement
I am from Buffalo, NY, and yes it finally stopped snowing around a month ago. In my spare time I like to knit, embroider, and most recently bake (it became my quarantine pass time). My dog Ellie is my sidekick and we love to go on adventures together, trying not to get in too much trouble.
This is me presenting a poster of my senior thesis dressed as a saguaro cactus
Today we continued lab work… so I will tell you about the names that we have given all of the lab equipment.
Once upon a time when we in August of 2018 when the new Ison lab was being set up/boxes being emptied it was decided that all of the lab equipment should be named after women in STEM. Thus began the quest to find the perfect name for each equipment. The we started with Rosalind Franklin the new thermocycler. This is a perfect name for a thermocycler because Franklin is famous for her X-ray crystallography work that determined the structure of DNA. Franklin died of ovarian cancer before the Nobel Prize was awarded for determining the structure of DNA making her unable to receive the award that she deserved. Our other thermocycler we have named Martha Chase (Wooster class of 1950) worked with Alfred Hershey to determine that DNA is the heredity unit not proteins. Hershey received the Nobel Prize in 1969 however Chase did not.
Rosalind Franklin
Martha Chase
Our ever loyal centrifuge is named in honor of Chien-Shiung Wu a Chinese American physicist who was a part of the Manhattan project, and made discoveries relating to beta decay. Wu’s colleges who came up with the theory for conservation of parity won the Nobel prize when it was Wu who actually tested this theory (hmmm beginning to see a theme here).
Chien-Shiung Wu
Our hot water bath is named for Barbara McClintock a botanist (#plantsarecooltoo)! She is known for her work mapping out the genome of corn and discovered transposons/jumping genes which are genes that can move around the genome.
Barbara McClintock
Nettie Stevens a geneticist who discovered sex chromosomes and the role they play in sex determination. Stevens had a short career but an impactful one, in the nine years after receiving her PhD she published 38 papers, she then died of breast cancer in 1912. She also was one of the first to use fruit flies as a model organism. We have named our gel rig after her.
Nettie Stevens
In-Young Ahn is the first Asian woman to be an Antarctica station leader she also was the first South Korean woman to visit Antarctica. She is a benthic ecologist studying clams and other bivalves. Due to her work in the Antarctica we have named our freezer after Ahn.
In-Young Ahn
Diana Patterson is the first woman to run the Australian Antarctica station. She has written a book about her time in the Antarctica titled The Ice Beneath my Feet: My Year in Antarctica. We have named our fridge after Patterson.
Diana Patterson
Our homogenizer (shaker) is named for the British entomologist Miriam Rothschild, the company that makes the machine is “BeadBug” hence the entomologist. Rothschild was the leading expert on fleas, she was the first to understand the flea jumping mechanism that allows them to jump very far. She also did work showing how the fleas are able to alter the hormones of their host to aid in their own reproduction!
Miriam Rothschild
Ada Lovelace who we have named our lab computer in honor of, was an impressive mathematician. She wrote the first computer program and algorithm in 1850 this is known simply as “Note G”. She also argued against the existence of AI “The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis; but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths.”
Ada Lovelace
We are not quite done there are still some process of equipment that need names but we have named the majority. There are many women in STEM that have gone unrecognized for the work they have done for their field. I understand that naming a piece of equipment is a small recognition but every little bit counts and over time a difference can be made.
See ya’ in a while flog!
Mia
P.S. This Saturday I am heading out to Arizona to do field work with hummingbirds and a desert shrub Coral bean. This work will be for my senior thesis (AHH that’s scary to say/type) where I will be determining how temporal and geographic distances between plants affect matting rates. So I won’t be posting for two weeks, but after that I’ll be back! I promise to come back with stories of cactus, rattle snakes, scorpions and NO ER trips!
Team Echinacea East working out of America’s premier college for mentored undergraduate research (lol) had a busy day! This summer we will be performing paternity tests on the seeds made during the big events from last summer. Today we did a set of DNA extractions on leaf tissue that was grown in the spring. This is a very long process and was a fairly novel process for all involved but everyone did a great job! Especially our Extraction Extraordinaire: Miyauna who led us fearlessly through the treacherous and tedious process.
The Extraction Extraordinaire hard at work.
While the samples were in the water bath Dr. Ison/Jennifer gave a very interesting presentation giving background on previous work done by members of team echinacea. For lunch we stole some extra boxed lunches from a high school camp going on in the building (they were very good). These stolen lunches gave us the fuel necessary to finish the days work.
Miyauna and Ren working on seed germination
Seed Master Ren finished putting all of the seeds in cold stratification. We have the seeds in the cold so they think its winter, then we take them out of the cold.
The seeds chillin’ mid “winter”
When all this was going on I (R clumsy ninja) was working in R analyzing genotyping data from a different project.
Tomorrow we will start running PCRs on the DNA samples we extracted today, under guidance of Avery the President of PCR.
In general I am interested in how plants interact with their surroundings, particularly the other plants in the system. I worked with Team Echinacea last year on a project attempting to determine how many pollen grains it takes to set a seed. Turns out it doesn’t matter and on the head a floret is that determines seed set! In the fall/this summer I will be starting my senior thesis/IS (independent study) with a plant called Coral Bean (Erythrina flabelliformis) in Arizona. I will be investigating how mating is affected by the amount of flowers on a plant and geographic/temporal distance between plants.
Personal Interests:
I am now a senior biology major with a minor in environmental studies at the College of Wooster. I am from Buffalo, NY. At school I am former president of knitting club, but recently I have really gotten into embroidery. I also enjoy spending time outside with my dog named Ellie.
Me last summer feeding one of the goats buckthorn
MEEC 2019:
On a different note another student from Wooster (Nate) and I presented at MEEC. We presented a poster on my pollen to seed ratios from my research last summer. As it turns out, pollen is not the limiting resource to determine seed set but instead the location of a floret on the flower head.
