|
||||
|
Hi everyone, I presented a poster at MEEC 2013 (which Katherine wrote on in the previous entry) and just got back from another poster presentation at Chicago Area Undergraduate Research Symposium (CAURS) today! Here’s my poster – enjoy looking at it to see what I found out from my summer fieldwork! Hi everyone, Maria here at CBG. On Tuesday, I came back from Thanksgiving break to find that one of the Dichanthelium plants in the growth chamber was flowering like crazy!
So many flowers! It was also interesting that the plant that flowered looked more stressed (yellow leaves) than some of the other plants. Today, I collected some pollen (shook the spikelets) on glass slides, stained them with 0.1% toluidine blue, and looked at them under the microscope. It was amazing to see the stained pollen, and how different the viable and inviable pollen looked! I wish I had pictures. I will be learning how to take digital microscopic images (hopefully tomorrow?). So hopefully I’ll be able to stain pollen from all flowers tomorrow, take pictures of the stains, and count pollen to get a sense of levels of viability in Dichanthelium pollen. Stuart is back! While Stuart worked on computer stuff – prepping for rechecks at Landfill and nearest neighbors at Staffanson – Katherine and I finished off demo rechecks at Aanenson. Apart from computer stuff, Stuart also finished seedling refinds at Randt (2 there), then set out for demo rechecks at Steven’s Approach. Katherine and I joined him after Aanenson. The three of us finished demo rechecks at a rate of ~1 plant per minute. After lunch, we set out for demo rechecks at Landfill. On the way out we had an interesting and informative chat with Steve, a beekeeper about bees and pesticides etc. At Landfill, we worked as a trio again. While Stuart staked with GPS, Katherine & I did demo, leapfrogging plants. We finished off 120 recheck points in about 2 hours, so again, rate of 1 plant per minute. We also flagged and demo-ed sling refind plants while at Landfill. Lastly, we “(took) a moment to revel in the prairie that hasn’t been turned into landfill”. And rewarded ourselves with rootbeer floats. Katherine and I had too much ice cream that we didn’t have much appetite for dinner.
Hey folks, it’s Maria. Sorry for late reporting – the post I had written earlier was lost due to internet fuss, and I didn’t have the heart to rewrite everything again. So, unfortunately, you’ll have to settle for a concise report. And yes this time I’m writing in a text editor first before copying and pasting onto the flog. Friday was Kelly and Jill’s last day. In the morning we finished demo rechecks with 2 teams at Staffanson, while Kelly finished harvesting her heads. After lunch Stuart went to K-town to pay rent and utilities, while the rest of us did our projects/ cleanup. When Stuart returned we went to Staffanson for seedling refinds. Stuart used the GPS to find and flag focal plants, and did a few sling refinds. Katherine and Kelly resolved a particularly complex circle – the plant by the road. Jill and I worked on a few simpler circles. We celebrated the end of the day with rootbeer floats. Dinner was pizza and supper was black bean brownies, sending off Kelly and Jill with a flourish. Photo courtesy of Katherine. p/s 31 August is Malaysia’s National Day! Selamat Hari Kebangsaan to all fellow Malaysians 🙂 Maria here. Woke up this morning to some rumbling thunder in the distance. The skies looked grey, but nothing too bad. We discussed how to do all the things we had to do at Staffanson: demo rechecks, harvesting Kelly’s Echinacea heads, removing twist-ties and flags from heads/plants that Kelly won’t harvest, figuring out 6 nearest neighboring Echinacea plants to each of Kelly’s plants that was going to be harvested, and pulling up ant traps. Whew! We did some individual project stuff from 9 to 11am. Jill finished up sorting ants. Katherine and Kelly went to NWLF and NNWLF to pull ant traps and remove twist-ties from heads. I was in CG 99 South, measuring Dichanthelium from my maternal lines experiment, and got 4 rows done before 11am. We set off for Staffanson, all 5 of us cozy in the truck. The corn and perennial weeds greeted us happily on the dirt road leading into Staffanson. Jill went to pull up her ant traps and then helped Kelly to remove twist-ties and flags. Stuart, Katherine and I brought out Sulu (the GPS), R2D2 (the netbook), and paper datasheets, and tried to figure out how to determine the 6 nearest neighbors to Kelly’s harvest heads. We concluded that the most efficient way was to use R to determine the 6 mapped nearest neighbors, obtain the distance to the 6th neighbor, then use a reel tape to measure out the distance and search to see if there are any other nearest neighbors closer than the mapped one. We would have to do it another day. Here’s a fancy spider Stuart found on his knee today. Photo courtesy of Katherine. On the way back for lunch, Stuart and Kelly belabored the pros and cons of color coding the top and bottom GPS poles. After lunch we set out for Staffanson again. Kelly worked solo to harvest heads, while the four of us split into 2 teams (1 GPS + 1 clipboard) to do demo rechecks. After a little while, it started sprinkling and we heard some distant portentous thunder, so we turned back and left Staffanson. Back at Hjelm House, Jill and Katherine cleaned up the ant traps and went to pull ant traps at Nessman. Stuart demonstrated dissecting achenes from Echinacea heads for Kelly, so she can dissect the heads she harvested when she’s at Carleton. Lastly, as requested by Stuart, the “Sync Your Visor” song I came up with as an alternative to “Sync, Sync, Visor Sync”: (To the tune of “Oh My Darling Clementine”) Sync your visor, sync your visor, Any suggestions for improvement are much welcome. Hey folks, Maria here. This is our 3rd day without Stuart, and I must say we have been quite productive. We continued seedling refinds at EELR this morning. Then we discovered that we had not yet flagged many focal plants, probably because they had not been flagged during demo/Katherine’s aphid survey. So we returned to Hjelm House, and decided to do demo rechecks at Railroad Crossing and North Railroad Crossing instead. We finished in time for lunch! In the afternoon, we used the GPS to stake and flagged focal plants for seedling refinds, and did seedling refinds. Jill and Kelly got quite a perplexing circle, where seedlings didn’t match up with maps. They found that the measurements were useful, but the map as a visual aid was not. Around 3.15 we went back to Hjelm House to work on individual projects. I measured 3 rows of Dichanthelium plants that were planted in 99 South Common Garden. There was one super-tall plant – ~15cm, as compared to most other plants that were 1-3cm tall. Katherine and Jill sorted ants. Karen did her crossing experiment at Hegg Lake all day. Some Helianthus heads are done flowering, and she is quite pleased about that. Oh, and the tick eggs hatched today! Almost everyone was quite flabbergasted at the sight of baby ticks splashed on the walls of the plastic jar that we kept them in. Ughh… Here’s an unrelated picture from July, the day Lydia and Shona GPSed/helped measure my Dichanthelium plants at Hegg Lake. I was taking a picture of Lydia taking a picture of Shona taking a picture of a plant 😀 Pic-ception! Today was a cool day! High temp of mid 70s. Ruth and Amy came up from the Twin Cities, to give us a jumpstart to Seedling Refinds. We overcame some technical hurdles with DroppedBoxx on Sulu and Chekov (our two lovely GPS units), and started seedling refinds at Steven’s Approach in the morning, worked way past lunch hour before Stuart called timeout. We had lunch supplemented generously with bounty from the Wagenius family garden – juicy chestnut crabapples, ripe sweet cantaloupe, and cool yellow watermelon! After lunch we stopped by the road outside CG2/Jennifer’s Plot at Hegg Lake, and harvested Bouteloua. We will broadcast the Bouteloua seeds in CG2 after the burn if DNR decides to burn the plot; otherwise we will broadcast half the seeds in the fall and half in spring. Then we resumed seedling refinds at Steven’s Approach. We solved some tricky mysteries with the seedling maps, and completed Steven’s Approach! We also found a couple of flowering plants that had been missed during demo. While we were doing all that, Karen was working hard at her independent project. The searching and keying paid off as she found a third species of Helianthus, H. tuberosus, at Hegg Lake. Here’s an unrelated picture of a pheasant’s nest near my Dichanthelium plot. The pheasant mum and I often startled each other during those mornings when I did fieldwork.
Look, a pheasant egg! And I know you’ll forgive me for posting yet another picture of Dichanthelium 😀 Hi all, Maria at K-town. It was raining this morning as we bade goodbye to Lydia. All the best to Lydia as she prepares to go to Ireland for study abroad! Here’s a great picture to remember the fun times in the prairie 😀
Karen arrived at the town hall yesterday evening! This morning, she braved the rain and went out to many prairie remnants to look for Helianthus. She reports that Riley, Staffanson and Hegg Lake seem to hold the best promise for her pollen limitation experiments with H. maximiliani and H. pauciflorus, and maybe another H. species, if she can find it. Andrew arrived back from his weekend trip announcing that he had all the food that’s bad for you all in one day. He, Shona, and Jill went to watch Alladin, the play by the Prairie Fire Children’s Theatre that Per and Hattie were in. They enjoyed it very much! The skies gradually cleared up though temps were still in 60s-70s. It was quite chilly in the town hall. With the squash, zucchini, and cucumber explosion 😀 😀 :D, Shona made zucchini bread. We also welcomed Kelly’s return from Northbrook about an hour ago. Lastly, here’s a beautiful photo of Dichanthelium with morning dew: Title: Examining Pollen Limitation in a native prairie panic grass, Dichanthelium leibergii It has lots of cool pictures and Dichanthelium as the background! 🙂 See you at the symposium! |
  |
|||
|
© 2024 The Echinacea Project - All Rights Reserved - Log in Powered by WordPress & Atahualpa |
||||
