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 Some heads in p1 that are just about done flowering. With so many of our remnant Echinacea done flowering (less than 300 down from the 2,000 we visited at peak!), this past Tuesday found the team with some extra time on their hands. Instead of starting out with phenology, we got a chance to make progress on our independent projects. Abby and I headed out to p1 to spend some time with the specialist aphid, Aphis echinaceae. For the past few weeks we’ve been applying addition and exclusion treatments to 100 study plants in the plot with the goal of understanding some of the effects of the aphid on its host plant–continuing a study that Katherine Muller began a few years back.
The wet and dewy Tuesday morning marked our seventh round of treatments. Since starting out we’ve learned a lot about handling (“herding”) our aphids–how best to coax them from their colonies, how to keep them happy during the move between leaves, how to get them settled on their new leaves. Aphid transferring is a delicate process that requires patience and a loving touch. Offering words of comfort and encouragement seems to help ease the transition for the aphids.
While we started out with a pretty scarce supply of aphids in the garden, only able to add a couple of aphids to each of our plants and struggling to get colonies to establish, we’ve noticed a recent spike in the population. After managing to apply about 10 aphids to each plant in one of our recent treatments, we finally had some successes. On Tuesday, we found about half of our additions plants with small colonies taking hold.
 This collection plant had some of the most aphids we’ve seen yet in one place! Some hypothesize that specialist aphids can have a more positive effect on their hosts as compared to generalist aphids. In just a week or two we’ll start assessing our study plants for fitness characteristics like basal leaf count and length of longest leaf, as well as for patterns in herbivory and senescence, to see if years of these addition and exclusion treatments have impacted the plants. I’m excited to move on to this phase of the research!
August 5 saw the team on its second day of measuring plants in P1. Ruth was there to help and we appreciated it! We found a lot of plants and learned about some of the insects that are found on the plants. If we had a lot of aphids on a plant we told Gina and Abby so they could collect them for their aphid project. We are learning how to do the process and getting much faster at it. Looks like rain tomorrow, so we may be delayed in getting back to it.
 Team Echinacea shows off the many troll-phies and ribbons earned at the Flekke-5k! Today was a winning day for Team Echinacea! Ten members of the crew (including Hattie and Per) got up early to run the 5k at the annual Elbow Lake Scandinavian festival with the catchy name “Flekkefest.” The humidity let up for us and the morning was a cloudless, cool, and crisp one as we assembled for the race. Approaching the registration table we found that Abby’s dad, who was in charge of organizing the race, had made us a “Welcome Team Echinacea” sign. The sign must have been some encouragement; five kilometers later we had quite a few trophies under our belts. Our very own Amy got first place overall for women! Between the rest of us we also earned second and fourth for women, as well as a few wins for our respective age groups. My favorite part about the race was that they gave out troll trophies–which we dubbed “trollphies” for short.
 Amy’s troll-phy for first place! Maybe most exciting of all, however, every participant of the race got a free book coupon for the book sale going on downtown. We spent the next hour after the race finding used book gems (like the ones below), before enjoying an all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet at a small place across the street.
 Some treasures picked up at the Flekkefest used book sale. Home, well-fed, and showered, we proceeded lazily with the rest of the day at Town Hall. Curled up with our new (old) books, a few of us ended up napping–not surprising given that our day started at 6am!
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This morning started off beautifully with slightly slower winds than yesterday, perfect for crossing Q3 plants. The team crossed all the Staffanson and Landfill plants before lunch! I was tasked with capturing video for an instructional video on how to cross pollenate plants so that future team members could view the procedures at any time. I had a lot of fun documenting each member of Team Echinacea pollenating various plants across the experimental plot. In the afternoon Stuart again tasked Taylor and me with working on a short video documenting the correct way to flag, tag, and twist tie a new plant in the field.
 Making Taylor’s dream of being a an actress come true!
After Taylor and I completed the filming for the flag, tag, and twist tie video Abby, Gina, and I headed over to Hegg Lake where I was able to test out the vacuum harvester I am borrowing from the DNR, I was also able to think about my experimental design and figure out what needed to be done.
After Work the team got cleaned up at home and headed to Matt’s house for some kebabs and a bonfire. Matt was gracious enough to allow us to ride his horses and gave us lots of vegetables from his garden. For most of us this was our first time riding a horse which was very exciting!
MAJESTIC!
We started off today with freshly baked scones and a visit from Steve Ellis, a local beekeeper. Steve is currently involved in a court case, Ellis vs. EPA, which seeks to increase regulation on the use of pesticides, especially neonicotinoids, when used in areas where bees forage. He told us about how neonicotinoids are nearly ubiquitous in today’s agricultural system, coated on corn, soybean, and many other crops. These are systemic pesticides which means that the chemicals are taken up by all parts of the plant. Anything that eats the plant—including the pollen that the plant produces—is exposed to the chemicals. Although they are basically safe for humans, they cause mortality to bees in high dosages. Even more troubling, though, is that they frequently have sublethal effects on bees even at very low concentrations. This can compromise their ability to forage, overwinter, effectively provide pollination, and reproduce. Steve emphasized that there is a lot that we don’t know about the effects of neonicotinoids, such as their long-term effects in the ecosystem. Steve is very active as an advocate for bee health, spending much of his time talking to legislators and people like us to spread the word about what is happening to bees. He told us that one of the most important things that we can do are to buy organic food, which will reduce both our own and the bees’ exposure to chemicals.
Local beekeeper and activist Steve Ellis visited this morning We finished up some phenology before lunch. It was too windy here (gusting up to 40 mph) to do crosses for the q3 experiment, so instead we did more phenology (less to do tomorrow!) and sent teams out with the GPS units to make sure the maps we are using include all of our plants. Tomorrow we will hopefully be able to do a lot of crossing. We will also do some more GPS surveying and work on independent projects.
Today started on the porch. We gathered at the table and talked about the tasks at hand. The first order of business involved organizing the mapped GPS data. Maps of all the remnants needed to be checked for missing GPS points and tag errors. Next up was an R Lesson. I loved learning the basics of loading/correcting data and executing a basic statistical test. After the morning lesson, we headed out to do a bit of GPS-ing and phenology at a few remnant sites, then gathered on the porch again for lunch.
After lunch, we started by pulling invasive thistles out of p1. After walking all the rows, we pulled 117 thistles in total! The two most impressive pulls were giant roadside plants seen below.
 Matt’s huge thistle!  Danny’s bouquet
After the thistles were pulled, we moved on to hand crossing heads for Q3. On the way out to cross, I noticed some flowering grasses!
 
Staffanson pollen was organized and put into insulating styrofoam containers that correspond to each data sheet. We worked consistently until all 28 data sheets were complete, and all heads crossed.
 Crossing is almost done! Stuart passes out pollen.
We started the day with phenology in all of the remnants as well as p2. It’s quite apparent that we’re past peak within the remnants and many of the big sites have more flowers that are done than still flowering. It’s an exciting time to be an Echinacea because the styles have shriveled and the achenes will be forming soon.
 An early afternoon meeting We spent the afternoon finishing the crosses between the landfill sires and dams in p1 and then wrapped up with watermelon! Stuart, Danny, and Will had a watermelon seed spitting contest and Stuart’s rapid fire technique left all of us wondering where the seeds had went. In the end Stuart was victorious, spitting it roughly 4-5 meters and impressing us all.
 Roxie is excited about the watermelon!
With three of us out of town, and Danny occupied with his girlfriend Lauren’s visit, it was a pretty quiet weekend at the town hall. After a particularly lazy Saturday, Lea, Taylor, Gina and I decided on Sunday morning to spend the day in Alex. First we went to Art in the Park, which was a much bigger event than I had imagined! We listened to live music, ate free samples, and admired the work of local artists (some of which featured Echinacea!) For lunch, we went to Mi Mexico, which was yummy despite the fact that I ordered the most boring item on the menu. (I guess I didn’t realize that a bean burrito would literally just be beans in a tortilla…oh well.) After lunch, we stopped at an antique shop and spent hours getting lost in the labyrinth of shelves and rooms until we were told that the store was closing and we had better check out. We made one last stop at the grocery store, and then returned to the town hall with our wallets slightly emptier but happy to have made the most of our day off.
Spotted this beauty at Art in the Park!
On Friday, Gina and I didn’t have time to do our aphid treatments, so we decided to meet on Saturday morning. We collected aphids from around P1 and added 2-3 to each of our 50 addition plants. Then, we checked over all 50 of our exclusion plants to make sure those sneaky aphids weren’t trying to start a colony. So far, only 4 addition plants have started aphid colonies, but Gina and I learn more and more everyday about aphid tending. Sometimes we talk to them while moving them to their new plant homes. They seem to appreciate and enjoy this. The treatments went really quickly and we finished in about an hour.
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