pollen interference « The Echinacea Project

Measurements of pollen

Until I get the website done, this list of measurements is all I can offer you. The measurements are in pixels. The measurements were made from multiple pollen on a single slide.Slide list.xls

Perplexed by Stuart’s question – a trip to the hilltop here in Watertown, and Mimi’s poster, I checked again on the amorpha pollen – it is NOT bean shaped. But I do have reliable pictures – (Amanda don’t bother getting its pollen tomorrow)

What keeps amorpha and medicago sativa from occupying the same locations? Legume wars underground? Does Andrea have insight?

shrivel data

Here’s a snippet of R code showing how to extract info from the shrivel character data (a file is below…

df <- data.frame(shrivel.txt =c("x", "xoxx", "xxxx", "oooo", "xoooo"))
df      # start off with this data frame
str(df)

df$shrivel.count <- nchar(as.character(df$shrivel.txt)) #add column

vx <- gsub("o", "", df$shrivel.txt)  # replace o with ""
vx
df$shrivel.xs <- nchar(vx)           # make a new column in df

vo <- gsub("x", "", df$shrivel.txt)  # replace x with ""
vo
df$shrivel.os <- nchar(vo)           # make a new column in df

str(df)
df      # final data frame

codeForAllegra.r

2 new graphs–what to do?

2 graphs that are basically the same as the one with alfalfa on my poster, bu tusing sweet clover and amorpha instead. Although amorpha is the most common native species in floral neighborhoods per unique plant, there are only 43 plants that had either just amorpha, just echinacea, both , or neither. For sweet clover, the sample size is 82, but the graph isn’t very impressive either….

Do you think either one is usable? I originally wanted to use the most common native and the most common exotic (alfalfa and amorpha).
ecan amca meof comparison graphs.xls

News from the big city

Hey yall,
Back in Chi town finally after about 10 hrs of traveling. I said “Get er done” to someone today out of habit and got a weird look. Thanks guys. I’m also going through baked goods and other delicious foods withdrawal.

Final version of poster: Jenkins REU09.pdf

Hope everyone’s doing well in K-town! I miss yall already…and my bike 🙁

ps. I knew Roxy would come through for us. Warren should’ve known better after the snake incident.

Compiled pollinator observation/capture data

Hello friends,

We just finished a rousing lunchtime discussion on the virtues of archiving, so I thought this might be an appropriate time to post our compiled data set from all four days of pollinator observations and captures.
compiledpollenobs2009.xls

species richness in floral neighborhoods

Here are files with presence/absence of species within the 2m floral neighborhoods
fnc10mNeighborhood.csv and within 10m floral neighborhoods fnc2mNeighborhood.csv. The first is just a reorganization of FNC.csv and the second includes info from FNC.csv and from WITHIN10M.csv.

Pressed plants and painted bracts

Here’s a photo of the box I built for drying plants with generously donated materials from the Wagenius family.

A pressed specimen of Anemone canadensis collected at Hegg Lake with Greg.

One of my painted heads after being repainted this week. Each paint color identifies a pollen treatment.

Thanks to Mimi for letting me use her camera!

Baggins

Here is a list of the plants I used in the common garden for my experiment on pollen interference/competition. I used 20 randomly selected plants in the 96 garden with 12 pollination treatments on each plant. The heads I harvested are also included in this spreadsheet, but here they are again: 39 952 blu and wht heads were harvested on 7/24/09.

Baggins.CG.09.xls

The preliminary results seem to show that the only treatments that consistently did not shrivel were:
silver-the control, no pollinations
white-Carduus acanthoides pollen only (thistle)
pink-Coreopsis palmata pollen only

All of the treatments that received echinacea pollen (either am or pm) showed somewhat consistent shriveling…. will it hold up to the stats…. we will see!

the most interesting treatment is…..
purple-Heliopsis helianthoides pollen only- this one had a mix of results, which may be due to differences in the amount of pollen arriving on the styles or some other factor. but it certainly did not show consistent style persistence. hmmmmm…..

Just as a reminder, style shriveling indicates that compatible Echinacea pollen has arrived on a style, and can be a good predictor of seed set. Style persistence indicates that compatible pollen has not landed on a style. In the case of some of my treatments which had both Echinacea pollen and another type of pollen, shriveling may not indicate seed set. This will be tested by dissecting the heads and weighing the seeds later this year.

More results to come soon…

pollen load progress

Listen up, Echinacea fans!

I’ve now finished making slides and taking photos of the first 68 insect visitors–only 107 left to go.

Here are some photos of the process:

1) Here is an insect carrying LOADS of pollen (haha! get it?) which I am about to transfer onto a small agar cube on a microscope slide.

2) I heat the slide, complete with pollen-covered agar cube and cover slip, on a hotplate. Next I throw the completed, labeled slide under the microscope camera and take photos like these: