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.
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.
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!
The Echin Team members divided and conquered today with some of the crew (Julie, Stuart, Gretel, Riley and Drake) migrating to northern MN to access the reproduction of the Prairie Orchid. A biannual trip the team makes with Gretel leading the way.
ThePrairie Orchid
The leftovers consisted of Erin, Shea and John working out of headquarters. Shea and I did phenology at P2, while Erin did phenology in the remnants and P1. The aphid addition/exclusion experiment then proceeded at P2. After lunch, we began measuring P2 and finished a whopping 3% of the total area.
Erin and Shea measuring P2 and fighting off pesky chiggers. Erin (Chipmunk Whisperer) charms a rodent to feed from her hand.
With about a month left for many of the participants on the Echinacea Team, the flowers keep on flowering, the weeds keep on growing and seed collecting ramps up for many of the prairie species. And for the animals on the Echinacea Team: Shea soon starts her senior year of HS; Riley, Drake and Erin make arrangements to move to Chicago; Julie and Jay begin their senior year of college; and John prepares for his 31st year of teaching. And Amy continues her research on bees with the University of Minnesota, spending much of her time on the praire in midwest Minnesota.
Stuart looks for seeds in Douglas County to be collected for Drake as the a cumulonimbus cloud begins to build behind him.Amy W (pictured left – Echin Team Member 2015-2019) wins her 4th consecutive Flekkefest 5K. Amy pictured here with Echin Team Member Alum Abby VK (2015 -2016) and the previous two time winner of Flekke 5K. The Echinacea Project Women have created a dynasty of 5K winners.
Today started off on a slightly less than auspicious footing, as the team’s morning plans of pollinating were largely rained out, as anthers don’t present transferable pollen until they dry. When the morning storms and damp stretched into the early afternoon, we began to realized that our hopes of performing the day’s pollen collection for our pulse/steady pollination experiment were likely to be dashed. Instead, we waited wistfully at the Hjelm House for the stormy weather to pass, working on indoor tasks like data frame cleaning or surv file arranging until the rain subsided enough for phenology data collection.
Over lunch, our discussion naturally turned to the age-old question of how a worm would wear a shirt, if shirts were made with worms in mind. Would they have small, empty sleeves, or would they disavow superfluous appendage coverings in their garments altogether? To aid us in our visualization, Erin handily mustered up her artistic skills and demonstrated exactly how a worm ought to properly attire itself with a tasteful tube top. To properly illustrate her point, she began composing perfect likenesses of the team members’ field outfits, like Jay’s signature flannels and JEGS hat, once adapted to the annelid form.
Lumbricus terrestris Jayicus in its conventional garbEven Darwin, our handy GPS point shooting unit, got in on the wormy fun!
Finally, the rain cleared! We scampered out to P2 to do phenology, and though our pollinating fears from the morning came true when pollen refused to present, the team kept up the momentum by remeasuring and rechecking some of P2’s most interesting and bizarre plants. We circled back to basal plants with leaves half a meter long, flowering plants with four heads on one stalk, and plants with more than 10 rosettes and 50 basal leaves (a rarity when most plants have only two or three rosettes with less than 10 leaves total). With half of P2’s 80 rows triple-checked, we shifted gears to remnant population demography, as Erin and Shea trained Jay and me in the system of PBORY flag ordering and surv file code naming. As we identified and recorded flowering plants, we started adapting the lyrics of AC/DC’s T.N.T. on the fly to fit our demography PBORY protocol (pronounced P-Bor-Ee). Our chorus went something like the following:
Cuz it’s PBORY Gotta stake it right PBORY Then flag the flowers in white PBORY Count rosettes and heads PBORY See how a population spreads!
Today was a fun and productive day. This morning, I went to the NW remnant sites to monitor phenology. I also collected leaf tissue from some sneaky flowering plants that I’ve found since the last time I collected tissue in June. Meanwhile, Julie, Jay, Riley, Erin, and John headed out to P2 to monitor phenology, crosses for the pulse/steady experiment, assess crosses from Julie’s heterospecific crossing experiment, and measure the final rows of P2. Stuart joined them later in the morning and they completed measuring the plot! Wow!
Does Ratibida pollen induce style shriveling in Echinacea? Julie is finding out!
This afternoon the team split up into three teams: Jay and Julie formed Team “Kick Ash” for Jay’s experiment looking at different management treatments on ash. They described the experience as “walking on a treadmill of trees,” but made great progress in metaphorically kicking back the advance of ash in ExPt 8 by applying herbicide treatments to leaves of plants. Team “Smoking Plants” consisted of Riley and me. We went to a spot that is north of landfill, south of around landfill, and south-southeast of north of northwest of landfill to identify plants for an experiment looking at the effects of liquid smoke on flowering. We found 100 plants that were flowering this year, counted each plant’s number of rosettes, and shot a point at each plant so that we can revisit them later. This fall or spring we’ll apply different liquid smoke and mowing treatments to assess just what it is about fire that induces flowering in Echinacea. Stay tuned for when we actually smoke the plants this fall! Finally, Team “Seed Collection” collected seeds for Drake while he is away at a family reunion.
Riley gazes at south-southeast of north of northwest of landfill
We wrapped up the day with watermelon and very impressive, definitely NBA/WNBA-worthy tosses of watermelon rinds into a five gallon bucket. That’s all for now!
This is our stand in team member George H.W. Bush who helped us with phenology today.
Team Echinacea was feeling a little small today with 7 people, but we took advantage of the beautiful weather and got a lot done! In the morning we took phenolgy data and worked on a pollination experiment. In the afternoon, Julie and I worked on our personal projects and the rest of the team went out to take demography data in the remnant plots.
Today’s flog is a bittersweet one, as it marks Team
Echinacea East’s last update from here in Minnesota. After what has been a
wonderful field experience with some truly amazing people, Miyauna, Ren, and I
begin our journey home to the great state of Ohio tomorrow. Though we are sad
to be leaving, we have had some great times while we’ve been out here, including
times from our last day of field work!
We started the day off by making the drive out to P2 to tackle some more measuring and make some more progress on the pulse/steady experiment. Though we had been making steady progress through the measuring, the team really surged ahead today, and now are over halfway done!
All smiles for P2 measuring!!
After wrapping up with the morning tasks, the team trekked back to Hjelm House for lunch, where we were joined with a few special guests – Stuart’s parents and Steve Ellis (a local beekeeper) and his wife, Karen. Steve gave a talk about his experience raising honeybees, how his bees have been affected by neonicotinoids, and his experiences going up against the state and federal governments to get them to restrict/ban the use of these harmful chemicals. Though we usually focus on our own native solitary bees here at the Echinacea Project, I think we all found it well worthwhile to take this short break to discuss the nonnative honeybee and the plight of pollinators all across the world.
We love bees! (and Stuart’s world-famous cake!)
After the conclusion of Steve’s talk and a brief flossing tutorial by Ren, the team prepped to head back out for the afternoon. This mostly included people working on their independent projects – Julie checking her crossed plants, Jay killing some more ash, and Riley and Erin honing their computer wizardry skills a bit more. Miyauna, Ren, Amy, and I were in for a special treat though, as we got to ride with John in the famous Bombus Mobile to go water the baby plants in John’s restoration plots at the school.
Bombus Mobile selfies!
And that was it! Our final day of field work concluded. It’s been a terrific two and a half weeks, and we wish the team all the luck in the world with the rest of their field season – we will miss you all!
Today’s flog will address a serious illness taking over the occupants of Town Hall. Mad Snail Disease (MSD) has been introduced to members of the Echinacea Project through direct contact with Avery Pearson, who carried the disease to Minnesota from her home in Ohio.
Those infected by the debilitating disease appear to be unable to make rational decisions and have been seen getting up to all kinds of shenanigans.
We hope for the speedy recovery of these individuals who have been infected. Sadly, there is no treatment for Mad Snail Disease; prevention is the only cure. If you are experiencing MSD-like symptoms, do not hesitate to talk to your doctor.
This has been a public health report by Ren Johnson.
