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Good afternoon floggers! This week, volunteers have been speeding through both counting and cleaning Echinacea heads in the lab. We are on the 7th bag of Echinacea heads and the counting for Experiment 96a is 86.2% done. Also, I have completed rechecking an entire tray of achenes, only two more trays to go! Tomorrow, Danny will be leaving the lab to move back to Minnesota to pursue a master’s degree in Data Science. I would like to thank him for always being so kind, answering all my questions and teaching me everything there is to know about the processes in the lab. We wish Danny good luck & will miss him very much!
Today we weren’t just Team Echinacea. We were Extreme Team Echinacea. Will used his monster truck derby announcing voice to let everyone know that what we were doing today was extreme. This morning, we were sent out on special missions to do phenology, pollinator observations, or both (so extreme). We finished everything and still had time to collect phlox seed and do an aphid treatment before lunch. Wow.
At lunch, we talked about fun afternoon project ideas, like seeing whose car has the best working AC and finding out which area lake is best for swimming. Instead of doing those things, we got right back out to measure P1, which has a climate similar to a sauna. Every group only had to measure 2 rows and we were done for the week.
Back at the Hjelm House, Scott found some aphids crawling on his shirt and adopted them as his own children. We all enjoyed some root beer floats, and Scott enjoyed his new found fatherhood.
 YAY FOR ROOT BEER FLOATS!!
Howdy floggers! This week in the lab, volunteers have been making great progress! Bag 6 (of 12) of Echinacea heads used for cleaning is just about halfway done. My personal progress while volunteering in the lab so far includes cleaning about ten Echinacea heads and counting 41 heads (or 5353 achenes) online. While counting, I encountered my first HUGE Echinacea head, it took about an hour and 15 minutes to clean! I also have been re-checking achenes for tails, otherwise known as florets, before they are weighed and x-rayed. I have re-checked 15 boxes with around 30 randomized samples each of achenes, however, most of the time, achenes don’t have their florets attached anymore. Finally, I have finished randomizing about 60 sample bags of achenes. It has been a successful week in the lab and we send a hello to our team members and partners out in the field! Here is a picture demonstrating how close each bag of Echinacea is to the finish line!
Not only did we finish phenology and get a great start on P2 today, I finished my independent project proposal! My research this summer is focused on how pollinator foraging behavior towards Echinacea changes over the course of the season as a result of community changes. I will look at what taxa are exhibiting flower constancy towards Echinacea by conducting observations and I will analyze their pollen loads under a microscope to determine what conspecific pollen bees are carrying to Echinacea and what ratio of their load is Echinacea pollen. My research will hopefully help the Echinacea Project better understand how pollinators could be contributing to Echinacea‘s pollen limitation and reproductive fitness.
Prescott Proposal 2016
Here is a proposal for a fun project. It involves using demography data from this (and prior) years to estimate the growth rates of each of the remnants individually. Actually, that’s basically the whole project. Action items for the next month include: reading technical manuals with specifics on implementing aster models (see the list of project publications if you want to read them for me on your own).
scott_proposal_1
In other Scott-research related news, I will also try modeling fitness of various Hesperostipa spartea crosses in experimental plot 1. Just today I got a list of positions of plants found alive in 2016 — my plan in the near future is to search positions in the plot where plants were found alive in 2011 but weren’t found in 2016 to assess mortality. Keep your eyes open for another action-packed research proposal for this porcupine grass-ey project.
Hi everyone! This week in the lab the volunteers have been working hard to progress with the Echinacea Project! This morning Art demonstrated and explained how to use the x-ray machine to identify whether achenes have embryos inside of them or not. During the rest of the day I worked on cleaning, counting, randomizing and rechecking achenes. These are the steps the achenes must be go through before they can be x-rayed and weighed. The past two weeks have gone very smoothly and we are now on our 6th (out of 12) bag of Echinacea heads that are in the process of being cleaned. Thanks for reading! 🙂
We met a half hour early today so we could do pollinator observations during what we thought would be their peak time. We were wrong. Hardly any bees were out and about on this very windy morning. Everyone finished around 10:30 and we met down in P1 to weed the birdsfoot trefoil.
 This little mouse greeted us in G3 this morning. The lunch table was very crowded today as we had a number of special visitors. Ruth Shaw, Dan (a grad student from U of M), and Amy and Brad Dykstra all came to help out. They also brought yummy chocolates and muffins for a lunch treat.
After lunch, everyone set out different ways. Some people went GPSing and some went to catch pollinators. I got to stay back to teach Lea, Scott, Alyson, and James my special talent, aphid exclusion and addition. Last summer, I worked a lot on the aphid project so it was a lot of fun to do again! Alyson even sang to the aphids to sooth them into their new homes. Roxy saw how much fun we were having and decided to join us for awhile in P1. We found 70/100 original addition/exclusion plants, including 33/50 addition and 37/50 exclusion ones.
 Here’s some aphids I found on a collection plant in P1.  Team members learning the ways of aphids. Today I also took my first trip to the infamous bog with Alyson and James! Roxy, the bog dog, took me on a wonderful tour of the place. On our way up, we stopped to pet the goats.
 Alyson trying to escape the treacherous bog waters.  Scape Goat eats out of James’s hand.
Hello, dark fringes of the web,
Sunday began literally with a bang, as we had thunderstorms all throughout the night. Most of us slept pretty well, I think. Still, there were definitely some thunderclaps right over us in Kensington. Despite this, Alex, Amy, Laura and Leah woke up early in the morning to do some field work for independent projects. Leah, Amy and Alex visited some of our Northwest sites to catch pollinators. Unfortunately, the cool weather and wet conditions meant that there were a whopping zero pollinators to be caught for Leah’s project. However, she did get this pretty hilarious picture of a Melissodes (long horned bee) on a stick.
Straight muggin with a bee on a stick. Amy had better luck, and did style persistence well into the afternoon, despite some scary looking clouds and losing a coveted sharpie.
The rest of us had more relaxed days. Lea made soup with some of our left over vegetables. James recovered from a mystery illness. Laura and I found a large beetle on the porch of Town Hall, which excreted a mystery liquid from its back when poked. It was really funny, but only because I wasn’t the one who touched the beetle. Many of us put finishing touches on our independent project proposals, and we began editing (ahem, peer reviewing) each others’. We finally followed through on our longstanding plans to have brinner ( = breakfast dinner). Amy, Lea, Laura and I made hash (no, not that hash) with onions and spotty yellow kale, an egg scramble with onions, kohlrabi greens, and Napa cabbage, and pancakes with mystery ingredients. Somehow, we still have lots of onions left — if only we put them in the pancakes! Over dinner, we talked about how to survive a tornado (hint: hide in the bathroom), among other things, and tried to convince James that he was having a fever dream. Tomorrow is back to the field for phenology and whatever else the weather allows.
 “Fever dreams” by Laura
 Leah just wishes that bees would land on a flower and not on her camera Laura and Leah had already started their day much earlier than the rest of us to wipe the pollinators that they caught yesterday in p2 on flowers in p1 for Laura’s independent project. When the rest of the team arrived at the Hjelm House, pollinators were out and about, so most of the team went out for pollinator observations. Other members of the team worked on assessing compatibility and used the GPS. From what I gathered from stories at lunch and messages in a certain group chat, the team saw some pretty interesting things, including a mysterious rodent. After observations, team members did some weeding, resulting in an assessment of a large thistle that might be taller than Abby.
 Here’s just one pile of buckthorn that was cut from a plot!
Meanwhile, I went to the bog to remove buckthorn. Since we had removed all of the buckthorn from four of my plots yesterday (HUGE thanks to Jennifer, Laura, and Leah), I only needed to remove it from one more plot. And I did it! Buckthorn was cut and herbicide was applied to the stumps so that it won’t grow back (*crosses fingers).
 Abby shows us her favorite Snapchat filter with this stunning selfie When we convened for lunch, several of us tried out various Snapchat filters and talked about which ones we like best (In case you’re wondering, my favorite is the flower crown or the dog ears). My data loggers arrived so another shout-out is in order, this time for Gretel and Will, who figured out how to put in the batteries. After lunch, we were ready to get back to work.
I went back to the bog to set up my data loggers. These measure micro-climate data like temperature and humidity. Afterwards, I joined James and Lea in p1 to catch any plants that had been missed previously. We found 11 new plants! It started to rain once we finished so we trekked back, finished some chores, and headed home.
Everyone was hungry after such a busy day, so we were excited about the risotto and salad that Lea made. We were also excited to treat ourselves to ice cream for dessert. Unfortunately I broke a spoon, but someone said it must have happened because all of that buckthorn cutting made me really strong.
It’s a busy day here at the Chicago Botanic Garden. Art, Char, Suzie, and Suzanne were all in this morning, counting achenes and cleaning heads. We’re about 75% through Bag 5 out of 12. I’ve continue to dry and freeze seeds from 2014 and stay busy with my common garden experiment out at Rollins Savanna in Grayslake, IL. We were also excited to welcome our new volunteer Ivy, to Team Echinacea!
 Everyone hard at work and enjoying some coffee!
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