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Today was an exciting day for Team Echinacea! While most of the day was spent measuring, it was made much more invigorating by the constant threat of rain – which we felt drops of from time to time – and by Ruth’s visit and Stuart’s return. We heard about the many exciting talks that Stuart went to at ESA and discussed how our phenology research is going to both fit in and stand out in a wonderful way. Speaking of large data sets, we’rd almost done measuring p1 and will be moving on to plenty of other fun things soon.
 The team measuring plants in big batch During lunch we learned about how the 1600 gallon septic tank was emptied yesterday and contained 2000 gallons of waste. How that was possible, the world may never know, but here in the Echinacea Project we redefine what’s possible.
Gretel describes the overfull septic tank as Stuart and Ruth listen
Today is Taylor’s last day which is really sad because she is a cool cat who will be greatly missed. This summer would have been very different without Taylor. She has brought lots of joy and laughs to the town hall. Taylor will be missed dearly.
Taylor is heading out to the Chicago Botanic Gardens to present her poster on the invasive potential of Echinacea palida! She’s been giving us her pitch frequently and it is sounds really good. Good luck to Taylor at the Chicago Botanic Gardens and with all of her adventures in the future! We better see you soon!
In other news it was superhot and humid today. We got treated last week and Monday with cooler and less humid days. Much of Team Echinacea has been zipping off our pant legs and kicking off out shoes in favor of our sandals in spite of the possibility of Chiggers and ticks. We did a little bit of phenology this morning. It did not take long because there were only 26 plants to visit in the remnants. It’s crazy because it does not seem like it was long ago that we were spending all day doing phenology. After phenology we spent all day measuring Experimental Plot 1. I got to spend some time by myself Harvesting Galium for my independent project. We also made a Friend who we named Eric!
Our friend Eric!!
Everyone wore the tye dye that we made on Sunday! IT LOOKS AMAZING!!!
Model life Happiness!
August 11 was an extra hot day. We started the day with phenology and then worked on taking plant measurements in P1 before lunch. The wise decision was made to measure again after lunch and then quit measuring and work on personal projects during the most intense heat of the day! Turned out great! Sounds like the rest of the week is supposed to be extra hot as well. We are going to have to do measuring in the mornings I think. We are making good progress and should have at least P1 and the 99 garden done by weeks end! Phenology is taking very little time now, so it will soon be time for the next stage! Let’s hope for a good breeze tomorrow!
Sunday was a very special day for us at the town hall: our baby Ben turned 20! His sister Liz flew all the way up from Utah to visit him, and we got to hear about her research job out west. At 1, we all headed up to Barrett to see Hattie and Per perform in a production of Robin Hood that they’d been practicing all week at theater camp. It was a great show, and we even got to stay for a potluck afterwards! (Unfortunately, nobody had brought a hot dish for our non-Midwesterners to try.) When we got back to the town hall, we decided to tye-dye, something we’d been meaning to try all summer. Many items got tye-dyed, from shirts to socks to bedsheets to Ben’s knees. To cap off the night, we ate Ben’s birthday cake out at the gazebo, accompanied by a gorgeous sunset. It was a fun-filled day!
 Per and Hattie at the end of the show Tye-dying fun! Ben’s beautifully decorated cake “Birthday Boy”
Yesterday in true Team Echinacea 2015 form, we planned our day surrounding eating adventures and a little bit of ecology. When I finally emerged from bed, I was greeting with the sweet sight of Amy hard at work in the kitchen preparing cinnamon buns for us all to enjoy! They were topped with a delicious cream cheese frosting.
 Cinnamon Buns! Sometime in the midst of this decedent feast, we wandered outside to discover heaps of corn and squash awaiting us on the front stoop! We have heard tales of secret zucchinis snuck into cars by gardeners with a bumper crop, but we never thought we would be so lucky to receive such treasures ourselves! Later in the morning, Stuart told us that the anonymous deliverer was in fact a friend of his and Gretel’s named Bob. Bob, if you are reading this our deepest and most satisfied thank you goes to you.
 Ben, Gina, and Taylor ogle our special delivery!
After a lunch of grilled cheeses, we did some grocery shopping in Alex and prepared for a grill out at Runestone Park! Despite the loud thunder we heard as we loaded up the cars with grillable goodies, we remained optimistic about our evening plan. Unfortunately, the weather had other plans for us. As we approached the park, a torrential downpour hit and we decided to head back home to eat our dinner in the dry comfort of Town Hall. We ended the evening with a rousing viewing of “Cane Toads: An Unnatural History.” Which I believe all team members would recommend to documentary enthusiasts young and old.
 A froggy friend visits Taylor during measuring today. The team went out to the remnant sites this morning to assess phenology. Of the 1863 flowering heads from the remants this summer, only 26 are still flowering. Of these, 20 are in their “end flowering” phase, which means they only have a few days of flowering left. We finished doing all phenology, including p1 and p2 before 11 this morning. This is quite a contrast to a couple of weeks ago when pure phenology was an all-day job. We even had some time before lunch to clip sumac and Salix, two woody species which have crept into p1. At lunch we said goodbye to Stuart, who is flying to Baltimore for the ESA Annual Meeting. He will give a talk about the Echinacea Project tomorrow. After lunch we did a bit more land management work, pulling thistle and sweet clover from p8. After that much of the group headed back to p1 for more measuring. Today we measured plants that were planted in ’96, ’97, ’98. We contemplated the fact that many these plants are older than Will, Taylor, and Abby. Ali, Matt, and Ben went to Hegg to work on Ben’s independent project. They were testing different methods of seed collection (hand harvesting and using a seed sucker) on Galium. They came back with lots of seeds! This week we will continue measuring plants in p1 and working on independent projects.
After a very heavy rain last night, we got to start our work day 45 minutes later than usual. Even though we started late, we were able to finish phenology at all of the sites (including P1 and P2), and crosses for Q3 before lunch. At peak flowering time, we had over 2000 plants to check on in the remnants and today that number was down to 211.
Rare sight! This plant hasn’t begun flowering yet!
Gina and I had time to do an aphid treatment today. The results were very exciting! Of our 33 addition plants, 25 already had aphids on them. We also only found 1 aphid during our exclusion treatment!
Here are some of those cute little aphids!
Everyone measured for awhile before heading out to P2 to finish off our thistle pulling job. Stuart brought a watermelon out there for everyone to enjoy. It was the perfect way to end a great week!
Rainy weather covered the research area this morning, so the team worked on their independent projects, entering data, working on plant identification, web resources, and learning R! At 11 Stuart gave us all a lesson in statistics, that involved analyzing Taylor’s data using a linear model and an ANOVA test. The analysis gave some interesting results!
After lunch the whole team headed out to P2 at Hegg lake to pull thistles. We pulled hundreds of thistles, maybe even thousands.
Abby, Ali, and Amy pull thistles in p2 Katherine in pain as she holds a bundle of thistles waiting for me to take a picture After an hour or two storm clouds started to roll in over Kensington, headed in our direction. We decided to call it a day before we got to wet.
Storm Clouds headed towards us
Some heads in p1 that are just about done flowering. With so many of our remnant Echinacea done flowering (less than 300 down from the 2,000 we visited at peak!), this past Tuesday found the team with some extra time on their hands. Instead of starting out with phenology, we got a chance to make progress on our independent projects. Abby and I headed out to p1 to spend some time with the specialist aphid, Aphis echinaceae. For the past few weeks we’ve been applying addition and exclusion treatments to 100 study plants in the plot with the goal of understanding some of the effects of the aphid on its host plant–continuing a study that Katherine Muller began a few years back.
The wet and dewy Tuesday morning marked our seventh round of treatments. Since starting out we’ve learned a lot about handling (“herding”) our aphids–how best to coax them from their colonies, how to keep them happy during the move between leaves, how to get them settled on their new leaves. Aphid transferring is a delicate process that requires patience and a loving touch. Offering words of comfort and encouragement seems to help ease the transition for the aphids.
While we started out with a pretty scarce supply of aphids in the garden, only able to add a couple of aphids to each of our plants and struggling to get colonies to establish, we’ve noticed a recent spike in the population. After managing to apply about 10 aphids to each plant in one of our recent treatments, we finally had some successes. On Tuesday, we found about half of our additions plants with small colonies taking hold.
This collection plant had some of the most aphids we’ve seen yet in one place! Some hypothesize that specialist aphids can have a more positive effect on their hosts as compared to generalist aphids. In just a week or two we’ll start assessing our study plants for fitness characteristics like basal leaf count and length of longest leaf, as well as for patterns in herbivory and senescence, to see if years of these addition and exclusion treatments have impacted the plants. I’m excited to move on to this phase of the research!
August 5 saw the team on its second day of measuring plants in P1. Ruth was there to help and we appreciated it! We found a lot of plants and learned about some of the insects that are found on the plants. If we had a lot of aphids on a plant we told Gina and Abby so they could collect them for their aphid project. We are learning how to do the process and getting much faster at it. Looks like rain tomorrow, so we may be delayed in getting back to it.
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