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This morning we split into 2 groups. Amy and Danny headed over to KJs. They staked points and are now ready for seedling refinds sometime next week. Ali, Katherine and I harvested Q3 heads. We got 40 in all! It sprinkled a little this morning, so the heads were a little damp. We set up a drying station for them.
 Ali and Katherine with the beautiful Q3 heads!
Lots of colors! After everyone finished up that, Stuart taught Ali and Katherine how to dissect the harvested heads.
 Stuart demonstrates proper dissection methods. Ali and Katherine practice dissection while Danny does absolutely nothing productive. It sprinkled a little after lunch, so we waited until about 2:00 to head out to P2 to harvest. Although we started a little later than we would have liked, we still finished up in about 2 hours! A lot faster than yesterdays P1 harvest!
To celebrate a week full of hard work and fun, we had root beer floats! Unfortunately, today was my last day with Team Echinacea. I start my senior year at West Central Area High School on Tuesday. I had a great summer and I learned so much! 🙂
Today marked our third day without Stuart. But our arrival to a Stuart-less Hjelm house was made brighter by the appearance of a tiger salamander! (In Roxy’s absence, we’ve noticed quite a bounty of wildlife roaming the area.) Katherine, who has known since the age of 8 that the majestic and bafflingly cute creature is her favorite animal, was especially excited. After an extended photo op and cuddling session, the team finally managed to set the salamander back down and get on with the day’s work. We all agreed that he was an upgrade from Ricky.
Katherine holds her first tiger salamander! Obvious soulmates. We spent most of the morning doing demography at the Rileys. Despite some grief and hardship caused by the abundance of mowed plants, we finished strong and well before lunch. Back at the Hjelm house we set to work cleaning and organizing, dealing with clutter that had been neglected for too long. Things got really exciting when Amy dug out the label maker. We spent lunch dreaming up big plans to label everything in the Hjelm house–in between fighting off the hornets.
 The Hjelm house is looking pretty good. After lunch, Will and I collected tissue samples from the Cirsium hillii at Hegg (that will be used to determine if the plants are distinct or actually one large plant) while Abby and Danny collected tissue from the angustifolia plants nearby the pallida restoration. Meanwhile, Katherine, Ali, and Amy stayed back to touch up the paint jobs on the heads for q3.
Our work done at Hegg, we headed back to Hjelm and packed away the tissue samples to dry out. We printed labels for the samples, but unfortunately the label maker ran out of paper before we could get on with the rest of our big labeling plans. Oh well. We’ll have to continue to do our best navigating the house with its very average level of labeling.
 Heads for q3 wait in p1 to be harvested.
Today when we arrived at the Hjelm house it was only 50 degrees! Brrrrrr! We were also down to a team of six following Ben’s last day on Friday and Stuart and Gretel heading back to Illinois over the weekend. (Abby was gone for her senior pictures). With so few people we got off to a quick start, because we knew we would need all the time we could get to get as much done with fewer crew members.
Our skeleton crew headed out to p2 to continue measuring that we started last Thursday. It was slow going but, having gotten through the thickest of the flowering plants on Thursday it was faster than it could have been. It is always windy at p2 since it is on top of a hill but today was especially windy and cold, most crew members could barely feel their hands which made entering data on the visor a challenge. We managed to get by, completing 20 rows before heading in for lunch.
After a warm up with some hot chocolate at lunch we headed out to do various things in the afternoon. Danny, Amy, Gina and I went to harvest heads in the remnants based on a sampling method that Danny and Amy developed. Ali and Katherine rechecked some funky measurements in p1 and harvested a few of the heads that will be used in the q3 experiment (exciting!). Amy and I went to a ton of different remnants and encountered a few problems, like at Stevens approach were most of the heads were mowed. The highlight of our afternoon was at Aanenson where we met a really friendly cow named Willow! she came up to the fence and let us pet her. Her not-so-outgoing friends were hesitant and we didn’t pet them. Willow even gave Amy’s hand a lick, “it felt really weird” said Amy shortly after the licking. Sadly we could not spend all afternoon with our new friend and went to continue harvesting.
Willow the cow investigates her new, soon-to-be friends, Will and Amy Willow’s friends investigate us from afar, clearly not as outgoing or cool as Willow.
Invasive Potential of E. pallida in Western Minnesota:
TAYLORS
After a very heavy rain last night, we got to start our work day 45 minutes later than usual. Even though we started late, we were able to finish phenology at all of the sites (including P1 and P2), and crosses for Q3 before lunch. At peak flowering time, we had over 2000 plants to check on in the remnants and today that number was down to 211.
Rare sight! This plant hasn’t begun flowering yet!
Gina and I had time to do an aphid treatment today. The results were very exciting! Of our 33 addition plants, 25 already had aphids on them. We also only found 1 aphid during our exclusion treatment!
Here are some of those cute little aphids!
Everyone measured for awhile before heading out to P2 to finish off our thistle pulling job. Stuart brought a watermelon out there for everyone to enjoy. It was the perfect way to end a great week!
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!
Today was one of the first days where the end of summer felt notably, and sadly very near. A big contributer to this feeling was that we finished doing phenology at all of the sites (p1 and p2 included!) before lunch. Several of the sites including East of Town Hall, KJs and North of Golf Course, are finished flowering all together! While Riley’s used to take many hours, it only took me and Will a few minutes to finish up phenology there this morning. At lunch Will taught us a puzzle/riddle which while difficult to explain in a flog post, elicited many laughs and caused hats to be thrown in frustration across the picnic table of the Hjelm house. After lunch, the most of crew went to p1 to continue working on crosses for the Q3 experiment. Many of those are done now too, and we have seen a lot of style shriveling hopefully indicating compatible pollen addition and a successful cross between flowers! Tonight we have a special guest appearance from Erica, Lea’s sister! While we’re all excited that she’s here, it’s bittersweet because it means that Lea is leaving tomorrow morning 🙁 We’re all feeling a little snuffly about Lea’s departure, but excited to stay in touch with all members of the 2015 Echinacea team.
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.
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.
The days and weeks are starting to fly by as we get into the busy part of the summer. Nearing the end of July, it seems like we’re hovering right around the peak of the flowering season for Echinacea angustifolia. In addition to keeping up with the phenology for our flowers (roughly a couple thousand across our remnants alone!), we’re also making timely progress on independent projects and getting important work done on the q3 experiment.
We got off to a quick start this morning sending half the crew out to do phenology at a handful of sites while Danny and Amy continued their work assessing compatibility across remnant flowers and still a few others collected pollen at Staffanson for q3. While phenology is proving to be quite the time commitment right now, we’re slowly (and satisfyingly) starting to be able to check the “Done flowering” box for more and more of our flowers. The flowering season is tapering off much faster than I had expected!
 A cross-pollinator’s eye view of a well-organized team carrying out crosses in p1. The bright and breezy afternoon had most of the team out in p1 doing pollen crosses for q3. Stuart debuted a new system for keeping us organized in the field as we share, swap, switch, and track down the right vials of sire pollen to be applied to the p1 dams. While the fits of wind that persisted for much of the afternoon were a nice way to cool down, it was not very much appreciated when the breeze swept away the valuable bits of pollen we were trying to apply to our flowers!
The day ended with a visit from some of the parents of the crew members and local science teachers (these two groups actually had quite a bit of overlap). These visits were timed excellently for our guests to appreciate the Echinacea in all their peak flowering glory.
 Bagged and painted Echinacea ready to be cross-pollinated.
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