It’s finally beginning to feel like spring here at the Chicago Botanic Garden and with the change in seasons, we’ve got some new projects in the lab.

All those E. pallida and E. angustifolia seeds I was weighing a couple weeks ago have been germinated and I’m in the process of transferring the sprouts to plug trays. The achenes first went through a two week cold-stratification, pre-germination treatment. I kept the achenes in petri dishes, evenly spread on blotter paper and put them in the refrigerator (4 degrees C), making sure to keep them well moistened throughout this time period.

After two weeks I transferred the achenes to the growth chamber where it was significantly warmer (25 degrees C) and put them close to the light.

Sprouts are ready once their radicle emerges 1 mm. Nearly 20% of the seeds germinated within 24 hours of being transferred to the growth chamber, and even more germinated the following day.

We place sprouts in plug trays were they’ll grow up for the next 5-7 weeks before being transplanted in the ground. And man oh man do they grow up fast! Can you spot the sprouts in this section of the plug tay?

Hey everyone!

We just updated our website and have a brand new page listing all the ways you can get involved with The Echinacea Project. Check it out!

https://echinaceaproject.org/opportunities/

This summer we’re looking to hire both undergraduates and graduates interested in learning more about the evolution and ecology of prairie systems. If you know anyone who might fit the bill, pass this information along!

Additionally, we’ve added a new component to our application process that we’re calling a “brown M&M.” Stuart was inspired by a section of the book The Checklist Manifesto written by Atul Gawande where musician David Lee Roth (of the rock band Van Halen) famously demanded that all brown M&Ms be removed from his bowl of candy backstage. While it might seem like a ridiculous request, Roth was testing his concert venues. The clause where all brown M&Ms must be removed was buried deep within a huge document specifying all sorts of technical details about the production of Van Halen’s shows. If brown M&Ms were not removed from the candy bowl Roth knew that there must be other details that were probably missed and so he would cancel the show all together.

Here at The Echinacea Project we aren’t as stringent as Roth, but we have included our own form of a “brown M&M” on the project’s website. If any potential applicants are reading this and wondering how to make their application go above and beyond the call of duty, make sure you read carefully about The Echinacea Project’s summer field work and put “brown M&M” somewhere in your cover letter!

The preliminary results for our Dalea purpurea experiment are in! Melisa, our Lake Forest College student, came for the final installment of her mini-internship yesterday where we analyzed the results of the full pod counts. Just as a reminder, these pods originally came from 120 D. purpurea plants in 6 remnants (Lf, Spp, Sgc, Woodys, Rrx, and On27) and we hypothesized that the sites with the largest populations (Spp and Lf) would also have the highest seed set. After looking at the xray images (see a photo example below), we compared average seed set, as measured by full pod counts, across the 6 remnants and found that On27 and Woody’s had the highest seed set. There was enough variability between sites that our results were significant (meaning that site matters when looking at average seed set of Dalea purpurea populations). Obviously sheer remnant size is not the only factor influencing seed set in these populations since On27 and Woody’s especially, are relatively small. More investigation to come!

Our volunteers have been hard at work cleaning and counting the past few weeks. After recovering two “missing” boxes of achenes from 2011, Susie finished up all the weighing that needed to get done and we were able to organized the 2011 achenes in hopes of getting them placed in long term storage later this year. Here’s an action shot of Susie and Susan cleaning!

I’m in the midst of searching for background literature on inbreeding and phenology as I’m hoping to asses whether mating system influences flowering time using Team Echinacea phenology data in the INB gardens. I’ll keep you all updated as these results come in.

Stuart’s off to Minnesota and I’m off to Rhode Island today to celebrate Thanksgiving. We hope you all have a wonderful holiday!

Well it has been quite a while since our last update and a lot has happened in the last couple weeks. I don’t think I’ll be able to recall everything that we did to wrap up the field season, but here’s a rough summary of a last few weeks.

We finished harvesting all the heads for this year on October 18 which I think is probably one of the latest harvest dates ever for Team Echinacea! The volunteers at the botanic gardens have now begun inventory on the ~2300 heads from this season.

We burned the new common garden site! The weather/wind direction looked good and so on October 9th Stuart, Dwight, Ilse and I went out and set afire the south field. It was both Ilse’s and my first burning experience and I think both of us found it be hotter and smokier than we were expecting. The burn took roughly 3 hours and was a little patchy in places but overall a huge success and made clearing the rest of the plot and planting a whole lot easier.

The next step after the burn for the qGen2 crossing experiment was to clear all the trees, saplings, stumps, etc from this new field site and apply another round of herbicide to ensure our prairie stays prairie in the future. After this was completed, Ilse and I then set out to stake (with the GPS equipment) a planting grid. Unlike other common gardens, planting in the south field did not take place in consecutive rows. Instead, we planted along “random” rows in the field in order to ensure that more plantings can take place in future years and so that we can compare different plantings across the field site without worrying about any small scale effects of location.

Prior to planting, however, we x-rayed the achenes down at the Chicago Botanic Gardens. We spent roughly two full days scanning and packaging achenes into glassine envelopes which we were able to subject to very low doses of x-ray and still decipher how many full/empty achenes there were. Unfortunately, some crosses did not yield any full achenes (perhaps these were incompatible?) but the silver lining was that we were able to look at the x-rays, pick out the crosses with only empty achenes, and exclude them from the planting portion of the experiment.

Planting got delayed a bit because of wet and cold weather, but we finally put the seeds on the ground this past Thursday and Friday (Oct 24-25). Ruth Shaw and Katherine Muller came to help out on Friday. We planted achenes from each cross along one meter segments. Planting went smoothly (it was 50 degrees on Friday!) except it was very windy. Even though Echinacea is not normally considered to be wind dispersed, we had be to extremely cautious when planting since large gusts of wind were frequent and could easily blow away the achenes.

And with the gQen2 crossing experiments seeds on the ground, the field season has finally come to a close. Ilse and I departed from Kensington, our home for nearly 5 months, this past weekend and went our separate ways. I came down to Chicago and started working at the botanic gardens this past Monday where I’ll be managing Stuart’s lab until June.

We are over the peak harvest bump! Looking through the harvest data sheets its clear that we have harvested well over half of the heads that were in cg1 this year. Lydia and I are dissecting the heads that were used in the quantitative genetics experiment this year. Out of just over 200 we are more than halfway finished extracting the achenes, each head takes approximately half an hour. Prepping the new experimental plot is still in progress though most of the trees have been cleared out at this point. We’ve begun collecting little bluestem and Bouteloua seeds which we will broadcast in the new plot this fall. We’ve also discovered windy days are NOT the best days to do this, even a slight wind will carry away the little bluestem. We also completed the first demography recheck of the fall and there are many more to come.