This morning started with Jared and I doing an inventory of the Hesperostipa spartea (porcupine grass) in experimental plot 1. We are interested in determining the fitness of each H. spartea. We went to each plant found during a systematic search. We determined how many seeds were present on each culm of each plant. We counted the number of full (having a viable seed), inviable (having a seed that would not reproduce), or unknown (a glume that was empty, or peduncle that had no glume) seeds for each plant and harvested ripe seeds for later plantings. We found one studly plant that had 14 culms and 58 seeds that were ready to harvest! After experimenting with several methods of tying the immature awns together (to make sure we could find the seeds once they are mature and drop), we determined the most effective way to retain the seeds is to tie the awns together with twist ties. We hope the twist tie method allows us to harvest seeds before they disperse. We tried several other methods for tying the awns together (tying the awns to the stem, tying the awns to a red flag, and tying the awns together) but twist ties appear to work the best. In the afternoon I tagged my first Echinacea (plant 1980)!
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It’s been a day full of giddy excitement for Team Echinacea. Not only was it a team member’s birthday, but on our first trip to the remnants we found the first flowering head of the season. If you look carefully at the picture below you can see the first style on the bottom right.
This plant is number 1414, first tagged in 1997 in the KJ remnant. The upper florets on 1414 are not typical in form, and appear to be diseased. Bets are still on for the first flowering head in the experimental plots. -Claire
This afternoon Claire and I struck out for Staffanson Prairie to check on the flowering status of Echinacea. Over the course of the summer, we will be monitoring the phenology of mapped plants at Staffanson to examine how fire influences mating opportunities and reproductive success in Echinacea populations. We found several plants getting ready to flower (including Echinacea #7553 photographed by Claire) but we are still a week away from floret emergence. Although Echinacea bracts were closed tight, we did find numerous other species in bloom such as Wood Lily (Lilium philadelphicum), Yellow Sundrops (Calylophus serrulatus), Prairie phlox (Phlox pilosa), Prairie Alumroot (Heuchera richardsonii), Silverleaf Scurfpea (Pediomelum argophyllum but always Psoralea to me), and the aptly named Mountain Death Camas (Zigadenus elegans). I graduated from Jefferson High School in June, and I will be attending the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities next fall. This is my first real research experience but last summer I spent some time with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources and the University of St. Thomas doing some work with stable isotope ecology. This summer I plan to study pollen longevity and determine a method for long term storage of the pollen. I am also very excited to work with other team members and help with their projects. I am incredibly excited to be a member of Team Echinacea 2014, I think it is going to be an amazing experience and I am going to be working with some very awesome people! you can learn more about me at my page on the Echinacea Project website. We started out the day doing what we do best: searching for seedlings in Experimental Plot 8 (a.k.a. Q2). Having braved formidable winds to plant them late last October, Stuart, Gretel, and Ruth were visibly relieved to see them pop up this spring. Since last week Team Echinacea has been diligently tracking down each seedling and “naming” them with colored toothpicks and row location coordinates, accurate to one centimeter. In the afternoon we located and counted Echinacea in the recruitment experiment, a continuation of the project described in this paper. The procedure is really fun: we find the boundaries of the plots with metal detectors, triangulate points, then search within an area exactly the size of a regulation 175-gram Disc-craft Ultra Star disc (a.k.a. frisbee). Go CUT! The best part of the day was tagging my first Echinacea. Maybe it just lost its old tag, but I like to think this is the first time this plant has ever born the silver badge. Sometime 10-12 years ago, this seed was planted. Now that it is finally about to flower, it has the honor of going down in history in the databases of the Echinacea Project, living out the rest of its life in the service of science. This 23rd of June, 3.65 m from the southwest corner and 0.79 m from the southeast corner of the northeast plot in Recruit 9, I named a flowerstalk “19061.” Isn’t it beautiful?
Doesn’t the flower head look ripe? Stuart says we may start to see flowering as early as the end of this week!
Eventually the time came to leave my new friend and join the rest of the team. This is where they were:
(Can you spot the team?) A nice day is Douglas County is a very nice day. Alex Yeaney, our intern from Lake Forest College this spring, finished up his report on the effects of a specialist aphid on Echinacea. Check out his report to find out his results! We had a very quick and efficient planting last week. Stuart and I drove up to MN on Thursday morning, picking up Katherine Muller on the way in St. Paul. We arrived in Kensington on Thursday evening, and immediately got to work. We broadcasted our remaining little bluestem and side oats gramma grass seeds in the South Field (where we planted our qGen2 achenes this fall, aka CG-8). We walked E/W throughout the plot and each broadcast seed over a 5m area. We also broadcast seed around the edge of the plot. Here’s an inventory of how much we broadcast from each of the collection sites: Peninsula – 1 quart We then headed to Hegg Lake to scout out a planting site for the sprouts. We settled on a spot near the parking area, to the west of Amy’s, Caroline’s, and the recruitment plots. The plot is 12m x 30 m with 13 rows and 60 positions. There is a meter spacing between rows and half a meter between positions. We returned the next morning and began planting by 9:30am. With three of us we were very efficient and finished our last row by 3:30pm. We we lucky to have beautiful weather, it was sunny all day with temperatures in the low-mid 70s and a consistently strong breeze. All positions in the plot were plant-able. Here’s a diagram of the plot:
Empty circles indicate positions where a sprout was planted and black dots indicate positions where there are nails. Plants begin at position 0.5 in every row. Row 41 is the most western row, and position 0 is closest to the road (and north). There are empty positions at the ends of rows 46 and 48. There is a bent over flag at each of the 4 corners of the plot. I’m excited to have the sprouts in the ground and to have participated in my first planting. Fingers crossed we have high survival! Sarah Baker presented “Flowering phenology of Echinacea angustifolia in Minnesota tallgrass prairie remnants over three years,” the results of her summer 2013 REU project, at the National Conference on Undergraduate Research, University of Kentucky, on 4 April 2014. We like to tell anyone that volunteers or works in the lab that Echinacea achenes come in all shapes and sizes. Here’s an example:
Now if you can’t already tell, these are not the achenes you may be used to seeing. These are all achenes from Echinacea pallida, a purple cone flower species not native to Minnesota but planted in some restorations within our field site. These specific achenes come from Hegg Lake, and they are some of the same achenes that Grace and Aaron, our interns from December, weighed and x-rayed in their analysis modeling hybridization between E. angustifolia and E. pallida. We are going to germinate and grow up some of these plants to see if hybridization is occurring in nature. Nicolas and Shona demonstrated hybridization between ANG and PAL was possible and viable through their artificial crosses, Dayvis concluded that the two species have overlapping flowering phenologies and pollinator assemblages, and Grace and Aaron modeled seed set of PAL and ANG heads collected this year and concluded that the model that best explains their data is one where the two species interbreed. So do they?!?!? We’ll let you know. |
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