Wu-tang cloud

The cameras were over-heating filming under the hot sun all day: so Andy bought hats for all of them to wear.

These pictures are from the afternoon of July 5th. We were taking pictures for fluctuating asymmetry to be analyzed later to see how ray floret shape affects pollination. that afternoon we saw a cloud that bore a strange resemblance to the wu-tang clan symbol

measuring stuff

white fuzzies

These are thorn hopper larvae. we have been calling them thorn hoppers. In the past they have been called black spikeys.

Below are close-ups of Echinacea leaf venation
this last one also has aphids as well as nibbles and holes

Here are my daily photos

this first one is actually from yesterday

KAP took the kite w/ camera up over the common garden today so they could fine tune the procedure and technique for getting good aerial photos. I took these photos as I was helping put staples in the garden and change camera batteries

The little black speck half-way up the kite string is the camera
Stuart was holding down the kite.
the common garden is kind of half garden half prairie.

these pictures are from monitoring/measuring/demography/demo of the common garden. Basically it means finding each and every plant in the common garden and measuring and recording every aspect of them

the internets are back

it’s been a whole week since we last had internet access at the Andes, and I have a lot of material to post. I have many many pictures to upload and many stories to tell, but I can’t do it all now. Anyway my posts from now on will probably not be in the order that the events actually happened. Here are some pictures i took today

this fly was on this head for a long time. I’m not exactly sure what it was doing. The anthers with the yellow pollen and the styles in the lowers rows are evident in these pictures

Flowering is winding down. This is one of the more photogenic of the heads that are done flowering

There are a few late plants that are just starting to flower. The may be the only one that is so late that looks normal. You can see one row of male florets on this flower. That means that this was the first day it flowered(mostly likely anyway).

here is head that hasn’t started flowering yet, but it’s not really normal. This has a condition that we call indented. In indented heads the middle of the head goes in (the head is concave), whereas normal heads are convex.

We saw a Robberfly today in the CG and I got some good pictures of it

here it is laying eggs into the spent florets on an Echinacea head.

here is a young head with an old one. In this picture the the open spent florets on the old head are large and easy to see.

Team Video

Aerial photos of the common garden…

… are boring.

I took about 118 photos this afternoon and the > 100 straight-down shots are not interesting. Straight-down shot will provide good data when we have the ground markers and get enough shots in the right places. But for visual appeal & interest, the photos are boring.

Flying the kite was fun. It was cloudy with 10 – 15 mph winds from the N – NNW. It was a challenge to get the FF16 kite up–a 15 minute ordeal. But when it got up, it stayed. It was tiring to take it down and then it easily went right back up again. I took shots of the CG and then went to Staffanson.

Here’s one of the few shots with the camera tilted. I like it.

This is a view of part of the common garden from the West. The rows are 1 m apart and those things are tripods for the video cameras. The tripods weren’t in use today and have plastics bags over them. Flags are more visible than the Echinacea plants. But If you click on the thumbnail, you’ll be able to see some flowering plants in the larger image.

Florivory

Studying and learning about insects that eat Echinacea and its seeds has been a sort of personal project of mine this summer. The other day I examined most of the inflorescences in the common garden that had been designated with disc florivory. I didn’t immediately find anything too interesting but I took some notes and photographs that may lead to a breakthrough later on. Today I found something that I thought was interesting and could lead in an interesting direction. See if you can spot it.

if you still don’t understand listen here

Marking bees

Several pictures of the Bee Team marking bees.

Altering portable power units AKA “The hackjob”

Well, here are some pics from our night of terror in the barn.

Stuart about to void the warranty on the camcorders

Josh trying to hack the transformer

Closeup of soldering job

I took some cool pictures of Echinacea inflorescences and pollinators and other insects so i’m going to put some links to them here

Echinacea swaying in the wind
I found this bee hanging out under an Echinacae receptacle when we were doing herb & ray
Prairie Lily @ Hegg Lake
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Late entry

Well, another picture-dump type entry tonight. Ian apparently like’s Jameson’s (now unused) mattress. He doesn’t have this beetle in his collection. I probably should’ve put it in my pocket for him. Speaking of beetles, I met a very friendly ladybug.

This morning we took phenology data on our Visors. For our non-biology inclined readers, phenology is the study of the timings of various organic systems (reproduction, migration, etc) in relation to the climate. Visors are the Palm-Pilots with which we take data. Open this picture in a new window. Note the single row of stamens (the yellow pollen-bearing male parts) and the three rows of styles (the stigma is on top; it’s the pollen-receptive bit). This is essentially the bulk of our observation for the phenology data.

In the afternoon, we flagged and twist-tied every (possibly) flowering head in the entire common garden. We have allegedly 1000 or more flowering heads in the garden. Jameson observes a few of these flowering heads.

Finally, Jameson throws a sandal.

Categories

Experiments