Categories

herb & ray

We did herb & ray again today, which is short for herbivory and ray damage (i think), and afterwards to streamline the process even further for the future I took pictures of the different categories of herbivory/ray damage. The Main categories are Brown ray florets, Brown tips of ray florets, and straight, obvious herbivory of ray florets. I tried to categorize my photos into the different groups. There is some grey area between Brown and brown tips and there may be overlap of how those two conditions are caused. Brown tips are almost always associated with shriveling of the distal ends of the ray florets. We decided that brown area larger than 2X2mm area classifies as brown and less than that at the tip of the rays is brown tip. There are also sometimes small brown areas on the sides of the rays, which I think merits some attention. Another common anomaly is for the rays to have dark uniform spots on them. The last picture shows that condition

Herbivory:
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Brown tips (bt):
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Brown:
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here is the spotted one:
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Here are some other pictures I took today that may or may not contain herbivory/damage
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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.
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if you still don’t understand listen here

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