After a full morning and afternoon of demography at the Aanenson remnant, followed by some measuring in P1, Team Echinacea ended the working day with an evening of relaxation and fun! We started off with some team shirt tie-dying, led by resident experts Erin and Amy.
Amy displaying a traditional stripe tying technique, while Jay experiments with irregular band designs.Erin demonstrates master tie-dying.
After bagging our newly dyed shirts, we started up preparations for our evening bonfire. Over the course of the past year, the goats have been eating away at the throngs of buckthorn that have been encroaching on our prairie plots. Once the goats have had their fill, all of the dead branches and trunks were gathered together to make this summer’s bonfire pile. With the fire started, the team started shucking corn, cutting sweet potato, and cutting branches for hot dog roasting.
Stuart uses a shovel to lay corn cobs into the coalsRiley roasts a vegetarian hotdog over the corn and coals.
After following our fireside appetizers with Jean’s amazing pasta made with fresh basil pesto, we finished off the night with stargazing and s’mores over the last of the embers. Overall, a great ending to a productive day in the field.
Hope you all had a wonderful Monday. Here, at the Echinacea Project, we had to wait a little bit to get our outside work started. It rained all morning and through lunch but very conveniently stopped as the time came to resume the work day. Since the plots were too wet the team decided to pick up with some demography and search for this year’s flowering plants out at Loeffler’s corner.
Throwing it back to this morning, I think it’d be fair to say that a team Echinacea trapped indoors is still a productive team Echinacea. The rainy morning called for computer time, during which many of us made progress on our independent projects and other various jobs. While the team congregated around a table in the main room of Hjelm, I took to the basement to work at my pinning station. I now have over 100 bees pinned and labeled with specimen IDs. I can use the IDs to trace each bee back to the vial and trap that it came from, along with the date it was collected. My next step was to roughly organize the bees by morphospecies(pictured below). The picture does not do them justice, but these bees are COOL! I’m excited to look at them closer and identify the many unique traits that the different species have. Allison Grecco paid us a visit today as well and it was very nice to get to share with her my project update! Best of luck with your master’s Allison!
John also shared with us at lunch, his summer project update. He has a unique opportunity to take what we do at the Echinacea Project in the summer and incorporate it into his teaching at West Central Area High School. He has a lot of fun and engaging activities planned for his students this coming school year. I’m excited for you all to hear/read more about it!
Hello, flog followers! It has been a while since I last posted a flog and this one is coming in a little late, but better late than never, right?
This weekend some of the crew went to the Minnesota State Fair!
The gang splurged on lots of unhealthy fair food that was delicious. We collectively got: pickle dog, peach strawberry smoothie, root beer, pickle on a stick (pictured above with Erin), french onion monkey bread, deep-fried cheese curds, nachos with cheese, sweet potato tacos, and probably more!We saw horses and remembered how frighteningly tall they are…We saw chickens, pigeons, and turkeys. We collectively agreed that this was the most perfect chicken on display.I found a melancholic beauty in these star-crossed lovers’ plight. If only it were meant to be…These were the most classic sheep we agreed. Their wool was so soft. Alpaca wool is also remarkably soft. When I have an extra $130 I think I might splurge for an alpaca wool sweater. We eventually took a break and lounged in the shade. What a beautiful group of human beings. 😭 😭 😭 (These are crying emojis if they are too hard to see).
We had a wonderful time and many of us were totally exhausted afterward.
Hello Echination! Hope all is going well for the folks back home reading my flog. For us in Kensington, the week has been full of three things: demography, measuring in p1, and seedling refinds. Although these tasks can be somewhat monotonous, the team is highly efficient at the tasks and we definitely have fun doing them! One of the ways the team has had fun is by visiting the many friends we find near and on Echinacea. Many are large arthropods, but sometimes we get to spend time with cute little froggies! Look at them:
Woah, a hawkmoth caterpillar!My personal not-favorite, a garden spider.A FUNGUS ON BUCKTHORN!?! This is interesting… anyone have thoughts on what it is?
Today, Team Echinacea spent time in the remnant site East Riley finishing up the seedling search that had been conducted there on Tuesday and then doing demography for the site. All but two heads that we found at East Riley had been mowed over- some possibly more. This site is notorious for that problem, but this year it was mowed over more comprehensively than it has before. Yet, the echinacea come back year after year and they still try to flower. They invest resources into a reproductive gamble, put everything out there, and hope for the best outcome. If echinacea can take a chance on themselves year after year, maybe we all could.
It is with a heavy heart that we announce that one of our own, Amy Waananen, has passed from our midst to her other home in the Twin Cities. With the conclusion of flowering looming large, Amy has left us to continue her work at the University of Minnesota. Though some insist we may see her again roaming the remnants in search of plant tissue, I know this to be but a specter of our hopeful, grieving hearts. Town Hall mourns for the loss of our favorite corner-room occupant and master compost de-grossing expert.
And of course, life goes on. Even now, flowers bloom anew in the remnants. Plants first identified decades ago dutifully sprout through the wire loops of their tags and allow us to greet them as old friends. Perhaps next field season we might once again find Amy at Hjelm, syncing her visor, scooping up her clipboard, and striking out for the prairie.
An Echinacea found rays spreading in one of our prairie remnants– a rare treat in mid-late August!
Today, as the Town Hall crew was contemplating our measuring protocol, we realized that our current methods of transporting ourselves down the rows of experimental plots are woefully inefficient. Walking requires that you constantly bend over to check the ground for basal plants and stakes. Crawling puts splinters in your hands and bluestem stalks in your boots. Hopping on one leg may save the airborne ankle from chigger bites, but your ground-bound foot is sure to find a gopher hole. So what does a prairie scientist do, when the time comes to locomote through rows of small plants and tall grass?
Town Hall has the solution: a swing car fleet. The swing car, if you’ve never had the honor of driving one, is a low-riding, 6-wheeled chariot, propelled forward only by your hands on the steering wheel. When we discovered a swing car in a Town Hall closet, the crew knew exactly what we needed to do: test every possible way of driving a swing car to scientifically identify the most efficient method, and assess its utility as a mode of field transportation. Drake demonstrated the remarkably effective “shimmy” method, sidling the chariot back and forth at surprising speed:
Erin, meanwhile, tested the experimental “hang ten” posture, which lets the rider pretend they’re surfing USA, no waves required.
While this method proved to be a wonderful balance exercise, it was woefully inefficient for our transportation purposes, the average distance traveled being -10cm.
To put our swing car to the final test, we had to confirm that operation would be possible in the field. Unfortunately, a thunderstorm outside prevented us from performing this last experiment outside. Instead, we donned our field boots and substituted tall grass duff for shag carpet. A resounding success!
The question of whether swing car riding can outpace walking as the preferred mode of field transportation remains to be tested.
Hello Flognation! Today started with moving Stuart’s herd of goats to a new paddock. Excitingly, there are now 11 goats in the herd! This is 3 more than there were the last time we moved the herd. It raises the questions, “How many goats will Stuart accept into his herd?”, “How many goats would it take to eat all the buckthorn between the bog and p1?”, “How many goats is too many goats?”, “If they chose to storm the Hjelm house, could we stop all of them?”, and “Wait are there only 10 goats inside the fence?” Luckily, all the goats were happy to move into their new buckthorn paradise, possibly with the exception of Baby, one of the newcomer goats who felt more at home with people than goats.
After goat herding, I went to go collect leaf tissue from plants in the remnant populations where I’m studying pollen movement. The rest of the team transitioned into measuring mode and proceeded to power through measuring many rows in p1. In p1, they encountered some exciting wildlife, namely this caterpillar:
After lunch, some of the team continued measuring, while the rest of the group went to collect demo data at Woody’s. Although Chekov was fussy, the demo team persisted and also encountered this important buddy:
It was cool and overcast today in Kensington which made for wonderful weather to work in. The team spent the morning in the remnants doing demography at Railroad Crossing. Darwin’s reciever was malfunctioning, so Chekov got a chance to shine. In the afternoon, the team spent some time measuring in P1. It’s a lot of searching for staples, but one does find many cool bugs rifling through the grass.
Woah! This week I decided to write a normal flog instead of continuing along the path of my patented Flvlog (video flogs). My Youtube channel was exploding with popularity and I just couldn’t handle the stress of posting a video this week, so I decided to record a tale of the return of a legend in pen and ink (well digital ink, technically). Anywho, here we are:
Today, on the 12th day of the 8th month in 2019, a Team Echinacea legend returned to the Hjelm house after a journey through the harrowing Rocky Mountains. If you are unaware of this individual, it is Will Reed, a 5-year Team Echinacea veteran. Will spent his last year in graduate school at University of Colorado Boulder working in the Rockies. He is currently studying soil moisture and plant phenotypic plasticity. We hope to hear more updates from Will on the flog soon!
With William in our arsenal, we started today off with some phenology (p1, p2, and remnant phenology; Will did #RemPhen today!). After we took phenology data, we took a hiatus from field work because it was raining. During this time, we got work done! A lot of us did some coding in R to process and set up data. Drake and I also met with Stuart to discuss our projects going forward! Will even got a chance to discuss Team Echinacea data things with Stuart. It was a productive rainy time! In the afternoon, we measured experimental plot 1. Will was very happy to measure again, even though many of the positions we found in p1 were staples. We did, however, finish measuring a lot of the inbreeding 2 experiment (which I am excited about, as it is the experiment I am doing my independent project on). At the end of the day, it was tough to see Will go. He will always be in my heart, but I truly just hope he can enjoy his research and continue down a successful career path.
Thanks for visiting, Will! I hope to see you soon 🙂
Will enjoyed reminiscing on his Team Echinacea days today. A great candid photo!
