Hear ye, hear ye! On December 14th of 2022, members of Achene County celebrated volunteer Allen Wagner for his service. In 2022 alone, Allen has worked over 683 hours and counted over 52,653 achenes thus far. However, Allen has been an essential member of Team Echinacea for many years and has been a volunteer at the Chicago Botanic Gardens for 17 years! The celebration began with an official proclamation from Stuart, our town crier. Allen was given the honorific of “The Count of Achene County”.
Stuart, Achene County’s official town crier, alerting the town of the news.
No noble is complete without their regal garb. Along with the title of “The Count”, Allen received his black and purple royal mantle and an all-powerful Echinacea scepter. Now everyone in the county will recognize our royal member.
Allen dressed for his new title.
There was quite the crowd for this special coronation! All great celebrations involve some sweet treat, so Alex made a delicious chocolate cake for the occasion. The cake was frosted so when you cut it into slices, the slices looked like achenes!
The crowd gathers for the special day!Serving the Allen achene cake!
Allen is just one of the many volunteers who keep this village running. We are so thankful for all their hard work and dedication!
Alex, Allen and I (check out his official certificate!)
This summer, we harvested 330 Echinacea angustifolia heads from 23 prairie remnants. Remnant harvest started on August 16th and ended on September 14th, when we finally collected the last 4 heads, 3 at Steven’s Approach and 1 at Landfill West. We harvested the most heads on August 23rd, a total of 109 heads in one day. The heads are located in 15 gbags labeled RA-RP (there is no gbag RJ).
We only visited sites where we recorded phenology this summer, so we harvested from fewer sites than last year. We did not harvest from Aanenson, East Elk Lake Road, Near Town Hall, On 27, Riley, Railroad, or Town Hall.
Volunteers Luk and Sue clean rem2022 heads in the lab
After Manogya and I completed data entry on the harvest list, I inventoried all of the bags that we brought back to the lab. There were a few mysteries to solve. We had several extra heads, but they mostly turned out to be heads that were supposed to be harvested, but someone forgot to check them off on the harvest datasheet, so it looked like they were missing. However, there was one perplexing puzzle that took some sleuthing to unravel. Two different people claimed to have harvested a head with a black twist tie from plant 18066 at Landfill West. In the lab, I found two heads with black twist ties labeled 18066, but I knew that they couldn’t both be the same plant. I donned my Sherlock hat and examined all the available evidence: survey, demography, and phenology data. From the survey data, I figured out that plant 18066’s neighbor, plant 27711, also had a head with black twist tie, so one of the duplicate heads was likely from the nearby plant. The phenology data revealed that 27711’s head had white gunk on it during the summer, and it had more rows of achenes than 18066’s head. Sure enough, one of the heads was larger than the other and had a speck of white on it. Mystery solved! I removed the imposter from the bag of heads to clean.
The volunteers started cleaning the 2022 remnant heads on October 11th. They are currently working on gbag RE, bag 5 of 15, so they are making great progress.
It’s been a busy spring at the lab: 11 volunteers and 6 students from Northwestern and Lake Forest College contributed to the Echinacea Project. We are currently wrapping up before field season starts, and we want to celebrate everything they accomplished in the last few months! Since January, volunteers and students:
On Friday, volunteers Marty and Mike finished cleaning the last batch of heads from the 2018 common garden experiment. Huzzah! The volunteers had been working on the 2018 heads back before the pandemic started, and after a long break, 2018 is finally done. Many thanks to all the volunteers who made this possible, especially the 2021-2022 crew: Allen, Char, Elif, Laura, Luk, Marty, Mike, and Suzanne! Now, we have a lot of rechecking to do.
So far this year, we have sadly not been able to have volunteers in the lab due to the continuing threat of COVID-19. However, over the last few months, we made quite a bit of progress on the remnant Echinacea harvests from 2020 and 2021. In the fall, we had help from volunteers, students from Lake Forest College, and externs from Carleton College. Thanks for your help! In January, Sophia finished cleaning the last head from 2021, which was an exciting accomplishment.
To track our progress in the lab, I created an R script to visualize the various steps of the ACE process for each batch of Echinacea. The figures for rem2020 and rem2021 are included here. Hopefully, this method will work for the cg harvests as well.
Click on the figures to enlarge
The ACE stages are listed along the x-axis, and the number of Echinacea heads are on the y-axis. The light blue shows how much we have completed, and the dark blue shows what remains to be done. The small numbers on each bar indicate the corresponding number of heads, and the width of the bars is roughly proportional to the amount of time each step takes. Along the top, the dates indicate the last day that the totals for each stage were updated.
The script to create these graphs can be found here: echinaceasandbox/oop/trackAceProgressTest.R
Since Stuart and Team Echinacea have started summer field work in Minnesota, you might guess the lab at CBG slowed down- but you would be wrong! Last week we finished cleaning another bag of Echinacea heads, and this week we’ve gone through over half of the next bag! People counting achenes and classifying x-rays have also been super productive, and some of the newer volunteers finally got their official CBG badges. So even though there’s a lot going on in Minnesota, we’re still busy back in Chicago. Stay tuned for more lab updates throughout the summer.
From right to left, Char is cleaning, Aldo and Alan are counting, Tessa is cleaning, and Art is chatting because he was actually working outside this morning!
As I’ve said before, here at the Echinacea Project we rely pretty heavily on the work done by our volunteers. That is why I am so excited to introduce you to the newest member of Team Echinacea: Priti!
Priti has been working in the seed bank here at the Plant Conservation Science Center, but has just started working our lab today. Priti will be joining us on Fridays to clean heads — the first step to processing echinacea heads, and one of the most important.
Here on the flog, we like to talk about how much of the important work around the lab is done by our volunteers. Last week Allen, one of our long-term volunteers, hit a huge milestone and showed us just how much he does for the project.
Allen has officially counted a quarter of a million achenes.
Allen reached this number faster than usual, counting up to his quarter million in just a bit over two years. We’re super thankful for all of the work Allen has done for the project. And of course, what better way to show our thanks than a big check?
Allen, Stuart, and a big check
In the future, Allen will continue to count achenes and hopefully hit many more large milestones in his counting.
It’s business as usual here at CBG, and we’re hard at work trying to finish counting the achenes from heads that were harvested in 2015. It may sound like we’re a little behind on counting, but that’s only because there’s simply so many achenes to count! In 2018, volunteers at the project counted over 800,000 achenes, and we’re certainly striving to beat that in 2019.
Tuesdays are particularly fun in the lab because it is far and away the most full time. Marty and Allen count achenes while Laura classifies. Shelley is randomizing and Naomi is cleaning. All in the name of progress! Hopefully as some of our volunteers return from their winter getaways we’ll start grinding through some of the 2016 counting, and we’ll certainly start cleaning all the heads from 2018 within the month.
Our full lab!
Look for more updates soon on how our counting and cleaning is going!
I’m still here! In Chicago, that is. Hilary, the volunteers, and I have been quietly and methodically catching up on lab work for the last month. An update on our progress:
Earlier this week, Art completed counting the last achenes from 2014! Now we have estimates of seed set for every plant harvested in 2014. He and Aldo will now count achenes from one of the inbreeding experiments, before moving on to P2, which Lois has been working on since March.
Anne has finished scanning qGen_a in 2015. These have been uploaded and are ready to be counted.
Thanks to Char, Susie, Suzanne, Shelley and Laura, we are almost done randomizing qGen_a in 2015. These guys finished randomizing the massive P2 experiment last month. I think they are randomizing so quickly I am going to have to ask some of them to switch to cleaning soon.
Speaking of cleaning, there are only 31 heads left from 2015 to clean. Wow! That is less than 1% of that year’s massive harvest of over 3200 heads. Soon, they will start the much smaller and more manageable harvest of 2016, which had only 1060 heads. Naomi, Allen and Susie have done a lot of the cleaning recently.
Leslie and Kathryn have been rechecking very efficiently and providing good, clean achene packets for scanning. They are currently rechecking qGen_b from 2015.
Art and Anne have picked up in assembling sheets for x-raying in the Fall. All of 2013 and 2014’s sheets have been assembled, so they are assembling sheets from P2 in 2015. Today Anne assembled over 10 sheets! In her words it was, “kinda meditative”.
Echinacea is only starting to flower in Minnesota, but it has been flowering here at the Botanic Garden for a few weeks now. I’ve taken some pictures of some of the pollinators I’ve seen!
Just a reminder that it’s not just bees that feed on pollen! Here is a fly I saw sitting directly on an anther . Interestingly, I didn’t see it move around the head — I wonder how much pollen it was actually transferring.
This bumblebee was going to down on this Echinacea pallida outside the Rice building! This surprised me because Stuart said he has only once ever seen any type of bumblebee pollinating angustifolia.
In other exciting news, today we had a power outage at CBG due to construction! This meant that I worked for part of the day in the dark. Anne and Shelley came in later to keep me company and we moved to a room with big windows to enjoy the ambient light. We were so inspired by this day without electricity that Shelley took me to Stuart and Gretel’s house, where I harvested some of the lettuce from their garden. I was happy for the lettuce, but sad because today was my last day of working with both Shelley and Anne. Hopefully I will see them again some day.
Me living off of that rich Highland Park soil! Thanks Stuart and Gretel!
This lovely bee is the 610th insect that we collected this summer for the Pollinators on Roadsides project. There's only one container of bees left to pin! This project is funded by @mnenrtf. https://t.co/VgJYZGbdo8
