It’s the beginning of my fifth week and so far I have learned the first three steps of the ACE process, cleaning echinacea heads, rechecking, and counting achenes. I have been practicing and refining all of these skills over the past few weeks and last week I participated in the trial rechecking assembly line with several other volunteers. As for counting, my official achene count is up to 14,485!
I am currently working on choosing my research topic for the remainder of my semester. The three ideas that I am choosing between are seed predation in E. angustifolia, climate change and flowering times of echinacea angustifolia, and physical characteristics of echinacea angustifolia that could be predictors of survival of the individual or reproductive fitness. I have chosen to use my time in the echinacea lab to investigate the relationship between the basal and cauline leaf characteristics and the survival of individual E. angustifolias. Pictured below is an example of a cultivar basal leaf rosette from an echinacea at Chicago Botanic Gardens. I am excited to explore this question further throughout the semester.
The pollinator team has gone through the majority of vials collected from emergence traps this summer, and we have exciting news! We had about a 14% occurrence of bees (# of vials with bees/# vials total), which is much higher than expected, and we still have more vials to go! Below is the current counts of vials as of September 27, 2023.
This past week, Team Echinacea volunteer, Allen, hit a milestone of 1 million achenes counted. That’s a lot of achenes! This achievement has led to his promotion to Chief Echinacea Officer, a highly esteemed role. Thanks for all your hard work, Allen!
A top hat is a must for any CEO Mid-morning achene cupcake snack
This lore I tell may be known by few, But the puzzle is truer than true. I’ve set out on my quest, To resolve this strange jest, With determination, I’ll find what’s askew!
At landfill prairie I roamed with dread The mystery swirled round in my head At last, like a flag, A twenty-nine tag! I grabbed it and onward I fled.
The field has been a wonderful friend But my time here has come to an end With joy I confess, I’ve fixed up this mess, Leaving others no doubt still to mend.
On this sweltering day, Lindsey and I worked on developing a system for keeping track of demopup, the process of mopping up any mistakes, mishaps, and general instances of misses. We collected a list of every site and made a poster to keep a close eye on the process, and have some fun. Chupy the chupacabra/badger/puppy has made a reappearance.
Lindsey deep in the creative process
We will revisit every site to search, demo, and survey flowering echinacea one more time. Team members will keep track of how many plants they find that aren’t all the way through the process, and once they get back to Hjelm they get to put a corresponding number of their own special sticker next to the site in question. Sticker options to come!
While working with the Echinacea Project since spring, I have surprisingly only ever cleaned one or two Echinacea heads. I have done a lot of cleaning and randomizing with Liatris aspera as well as rechecking, scanning, and randomizing for Echinacea angustifolia. But here is one of those rare heads cleaned by me! It has been cleaned, rechecked, and now scanned by yours truly. Sadly there were no achenes found in this one.
It’s rainy season! The past few days we have been getting a good amount of rain. Walking into the garden, it felt like I had woken up at the crack of dawn or was getting in late in the afternoon. While the rain makes me a little drowsy, it makes all the plants very happy. Here are some of those happy plants!
