Steph wrote a field guide years ago to help us identify insects that visit Echinacea heads during the summer in Minnesota. It still serves us remarkably well, but hasn’t been posted until now. Here it is!
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As August draws to a close, we have been busy wrapping up phenology, making progress on demography, and harvesting Echinacea heads. While Claire, Elizabeth, and Stuart harvested heads at Hegg Lake, I mapped a patch of Echinacea angustifolia located a couple hundred meters west of P2. The patch centers around a small knoll ringed by poison ivy. I shot GPS points for 7 plants on the periphery of this Echinacea patch. Within the patch, I found 30 Echinacea flowering plants with a total of 37 heads. Most plants were located on the southwest slope of the knoll. Although I did not find any individuals on the north or east slopes, these hillsides should offer good Echinacea habitat. In preparation for the fall burn at Hegg Lake, we set up a small project to monitor a patch of Hill’s Thistle (Cirsium hilli). We identified, shot GPS points, and measured the basal rosette diameter for 28 individuals. After mapping and measuring the thistles, we split the patch into two plots and mowed burn breaks around our plots. The north plot will not be burned in the fall. Like Echinacea, C. hillii inhabits dry prairies but Hill’s thistle is somewhat rare and is listed as a Species of Special Concern in Minnesota. Fire is thought to be necessary for maintaining the native plant communities of dry prairies but little is known about C. hillii responds to fire. I’ve attached some goodies for everyone today, which are strategically placed at the end of this post. I am heading back to California on Tuesday and this will be my last flog post. I am go grateful to have been given this opportunity and I will miss lovely meals, Gretel’s chocolate cake, and all of the wonderful people I’ve met. I could list many other things that I will miss, but I suspect everyone is anxious to get to the sweeter section of this post. AKA: EVERYTHING ANYONE COULD EVER WANT/NEED TO REPEAT THE POLLINATOR EFFICIENCY EXPERIMENT My original proposal (with preliminary protocol): Metadata for PolObData_P2_2014_Final.doc Metadata for PolObData_P1_2014_Final.doc Metadata for P2_videoIDdatasheet_2014.doc Metadata for P1_videoIDdatasheet_2014.doc Dataset used for Analysis: PLUS HERE IS A PICTURE OF A MONARCH!!!
I hope everyone enjoys their summer and I’m excited to see what happens in the months and years to come! Cheers! This afternoon the whole team ventured out to Staffanson prairie and collected demographic information on Echinacea plants. In addition to the 140 plants already flagged for phenology, we staked and collected data on roughly 200 additional plants! While we put a substantial dent in the demography we need to do at Staffanson this afternoon, we still have a ways to go. Between 2010 and 2014 Team Echinacea mapped 1074 points, including 649 unique tag numbers. We will revisit all of these plants this summer in order to continue building a longitudinal demographic database. I attached a graph to illustrate the temporal distribution of Echinacea tags at Staffanson. Note that all tags in the 19000s were placed in 2014, tags in the 18000s were placed in 2013, and tags in the 17000s were placed in 2012, etc. We have 410 unique tag numbers placed between 1996 and 2009 on our list of plants to stake! Today was a great day for Team Echinacea! After a quick morning of remnant phenology, we finished measuring Lydia’s Experimental Plot 09!!! On the Northwest Phenology Route, all flowering Echinacea at East Elk Lake Road and North West of Landfill have finished flowering. It is pretty cool to think of how long we have been returning to these sites for phenology, and now many of them are wrapping up (and quickly!). In the afternoon Elizabeth, Gretel, Jared and I were busy working on demography at East Riley, Riley, Railroad Crossing, and North of Railroad Crossing. Other team members went to KJ’s to look for seedlings that teams have been following in years past. On the pollinator note comes a follow up from Steve Ellis’s talk with us last Friday. I recently came to learn that the city of Shorewood, MN has passed a law banning the use of neonicotinoids!!!! Shorewood now joins the all too small list of cities banning neonics, including Eugene, Oregon and Spokane, Washington. Although this is a small step towards protecting the bees, Shorewood has made a very important statement. Check out the Star Tribune article about the recent ban, along with a post on the Beyond Pesticides Daily News Blog! http://www.startribune.com/local/west/269627281.html
Today we spent the morning doing remnant phenology. It seems that we are getting to the end of flowering and phenology is going faster and faster. During phenology we collected pollen that will be freeze dried and used for crosses next summer! Woah! While I was collecting pollen from the single flowering plant at the DOG site, the elusive three legged dog came to visit me. She fell down by me and panted while I collected the pollen. In the afternoon we furiously measured Experimental Plot 1. Gretel and I raced other groups aswell as each other, finishing four rows before we called it a day and headed in. I can’t believe how quickly the past eight weeks have passed. Both my fellow Team Echinacea crewmembers and I have had great successes with our group and individual projects. In exciting individual project news, Keaton and I have finished collecting observation data for my pollinator efficiency project! We were able to record over 175 visits, more than triple the number recorded last year. The work isn’t over yet though, as we still have to re-watch and re-name files for over 175 visits and analyze a (beautiful and majestic) mountain of data. Here are some of the big numbers: Greatest number of shriveled styles: Date: July 23rd Longest Visit (based on videos watched thus far): Date: July 23rd All though we still need to climb a few more pitches on data mountain before we can say with certainty, it appears as though long visits by Andrena do not necessarily result in more shriveled styles. Based on field observations, we believe this is because Andrena bees normally spend longer on the first heads they visit when their pollen baskets are un-filled with the compatible pollen required to cause style shriveling. The ideal visit duration seems to be 2-5 minutes for Andrena. Well I better put my harness on and get back to climbing. The peak is in sight, but it will take some real finger strength and mental fortitude to reach it. Cheers! These are my preliminary results after adding 2 aphids to each of the 80 plants in my experiment (20 of each variant) and checking on their survival after about a week:
The most interesting result is that aphids were able to survive on each variant, including Echinacea pallida (“pal_pal”). Lauren Hobbs and Hillary Lyon found that aphids did not survive on E. pallida in their experiment. If the aphids persist, it could challenge the species’ status as specialist. If they eventually die off, it could provide an insight into what makes E. pallida inhospitable to them. Another result is that, while E. pallida had the most plants sustaining aphids and E. angustifolia the least, E. angustifolia had the highest average aphid load and E. pallida the lowest. Perhaps it is harder for aphids to colonize E. angustifolia but easier for them to persist once present. It is important to note that the plants in this experiment are only a year old, and so perhaps aphid survival is more affected by plant size than pedigree at this stage. I am continuing my additions and observations with extra gusto, because I can’t wait to see if these trends bear out over repeated trials, or whether new ones will emerge. The small town of Kensington received five new adorable puppies last week. After some sleuthing and chatting with the friendly locals, team Echinacea received the chance for some much needed puppy playtime.
But what’s more exciting than puppies? Proposals and updated procedures! Pollinator Efficiency Proposal 2014 .doc Pollinator Efficiency Procedure.doc Attached to this post you will find team pollinator’s original proposal as well as an updated procedure and an updated datasheet. The past three weeks have flown by and we have already conducted observations on 175 heads! This means that we are only 25 heads short of our goal just in time for the end of flowering. It is also amazing how much we have learned and how much we have had to change our procedure. I hope that someone will pick up this project next summer and this updated information will help them to avoid some of the problems we’ve encountered. In other exciting news, tonight I cooked Ratatouille for the team. Thank you Gretel and the Wagenius garden for the delicious basil!
My favorite French dish + my favorite people = the perfect end to a relaxing Sunday. We spent the morning working on our personal projects. Elizabeth assessed style shriveling on her crossed flowers at Yellow Orchid Hill, where, she reports, flowering has recently passed its peak. Meanwhile, Claire and Jared performed crosses on the focal plants on the west unit of Staffanson. In P1, Will worked on his pollen preservation experiment and the Pollinator Posse (Keaton, Maureen, and Jennifer) surveyed P1 phenology. Further afield, Alli continued her flowering community analysis. But the real action was at Hegg Lake, where I finished my first round of aphid additions to Echinacea angustifolia, E. pallida, and their hybrids in P7. I have almost doubled my efficiency since starting the additions, performing 20 additions in a little over an hour. I also surveyed the phenology of the 18 E. pallida flowering in the restoration nearby. Aphid survival and flowering phenology may seem pretty disparate topics–and they are–but they both inform our understanding of the consequences of introducing a non-native but closely related Echinacea species. Do they support the same aphids? How about their hybrids? How likely are they to hybridize? How much does their flowering phenology overlap? It’s hard to stick to just one question. Doubtless inspired by my example, the rest of the team came to Hegg in the afternoon, where we measured plants in P2. Many of us we were able to increase our efficiency by working alone instead of in pairs, and row by row we progressed eastward. Less than an afternoon’s work remains. |
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