Today we got the microscope camera in the mail– here are the results!
This is the long-awaited photo of Echinacea angustifolia pollen. THIS IS IT, GUYS. Are you crying yet?
Love,
Daniel and Amanda
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As promised, you can read the protocol I’ve developed for collecting pollen styles from Echinacea plants. This protocol will be joined with Mimi and Amanda’s to form one complete and very awesome experiment. You can find my protocol here: Input welcome! -Kate Firstly, does anyone have a good acronym for this experiment? I tried PONS but don’t really like it. Also, I wrote up a list of what each person needs for next week’s endeavors. If I’ve estimated times correctly, we need 9 people to do pollinator observations, 3-4 ppl for FNC (but the more the merrier), and 3-4 people for flagging plants beforehand (again the more the better) :ech PONS equip list.doc What we still need : 9 possible remnants have been chosen (based on size of flowering plant populations in 2004 & 2005) and the back ups as well so here they are: Hopefully Friday pm or Monday pm we can drive around to these sites and assess the abundance of flowering Echinacea plants, and also get a good understanding of what may be co-flowering with Echinacea next week. We will need to be flexible…if there aren’t enough plants flowering, then we will have to push the experiment back, and our second round later in the summer will have to be less than 2 weeks apart from the 1st round as we had originally planned. A recent addition to our project is the potential to assess reproductive success using the style persistence method since it will be very valuable data and we are going to be collecting styles anyway for Kate. We need to finalize protocols (I will try to post mine asap), figure out how to randomly select fl. plants in Staffanson and Landfill, the largest remnants, and I need to do some more practice runs of FNC with the newly made forms that Gretel helped me with today. We also will hopefully be able to do some practice runs of insect collecting this Friday with beemaster Amanda. I think field season is starting to get into full swing. Thank you to everyone who has helped thus far with suggestions and advice. It has truly been appreciated. Hey Everyone, I’ve finally made it to the flog. So excited. ^_^ For all our loyal followers, my name is Kate and I’ll be starting the Masters program at Northwestern in the fall. Thus, part of my energy this summer will be devoted to thinking/researching/exploring possible masters projects. Stuart, Caroline, and Megan have already been very helpful in setting me on the right track; they all have some great ideas and thoughts on what I could focus on. I’m feeling a bit spoiled for choice, actually. Guess I have a lot of reading to do! I will also be working with the Pollinator Sub-team of the Echinacea Team. Allegra, Amanda, Mimi and I will all be tackling various aspects of the great pollen issues surrounding Echinacea. The questions I will be attempting to shed light on include: I’ll be posting a proposal type document with my methods soon, so watch for that. Ta for now, My project is almost ready to start this week! I will be hand pollinating heads on 20 flowering plants in the ’96 section of the CG with different species of foreign pollen and Echinacea pollen to simulate pollen loads arriving from generalist pollinators. The Echinacea pollen will be applied at the same time as the foreign pollen, 4 hours after, or not at all depending on the treatment. I should start painting bracts for the first flowers in the next couple of days. After discussing the pros and cons of different pollinator exclusion methods, I have decided I will use bags for the 20 plants in my study, and cages for the plants I will be taking pollen from frequently. All my plants now have blue flags in the CG. Ruth brought new paint for us to use, including a lovely new dark purple color. Thanks Ruth! I have also decided to use 3 different foreign pollen donors and no mixes for my treatments. After some practicing collecting pollen from different species at the Landfill, here are the best species I have come up with that have easy to collect pollen: Other possibilities: Also, the bike gang is now 7 deep, so K-town betta watchout! Allegra Here’s a file with plants that Allegra can use for her pollen interference/precedence experiment. These are all plants identified yesterday as going to flower in 2009. Plants are sorted according to priority order–random, except that plants from site of origin “Unknown” are given priority 1. I recommend going down the list and excluding all plants that don’t have at least two promising heads. Flag all included plants with labels 1, 2, 3, …. Stop when you have enough for your experiment. Ask Gretel which color flag to use. Blue is an option because your plants are in CG96 and Andrea’s are in CG97. Here’s what I’ve come up with for the revisions to my original proposal as of Friday’s group discussion; it is not in full form yet but I wanted to flog what I have so far so that people could read it and correct any mistakes I’ve made, make suggestions, etc. Thanks Oh and friday was a big day in the common garden because the first Echinacea plant (in the 99garden I believe) released its pollen. Tomorrow we will investigate to see if any more have followed suit. We also searched for spittle on Echinacea plants for an hour on friday to help Daniel know whether he has a sufficient sample size and found 22 with spittle on them in roughly half the garden. Hello again, field log readers– I know it’s been a trying twenty hours of waiting, but I now have more details regarding my independent project! Just by clicking on my proposal (above) you will get an idea of the specific questions I’d like to answer, how I plan to go about answering those questions and how my study fits into this summer’s bigger picture work on competition for pollination. Take it from me, it’s a riveting read! I would greatly appreciate any questions or comments about this proposal– whether you are part of the Project or just an Echinacea enthusiast in K-town for Runestone Days, feel free to write in the comments. Thanks! |
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