The Echinacea Project

PDF link for Pollinator Efficiency Outline

I realized not everyone can access a .docx file, so here is a PDF file link…

Co-flowering plant Phenology Proposal

Hello fellow floggers!

This is my first flog, so i’ll introduce myself.
My name is Laura and I currently go to school at Florida International University. I’m going to be senior in the fall and I’m majoring in Environmental Studies.
I have choose to do my independent study on determining the phenology of co-flowering plants whos pollen has been previously shown to interfere with Echinacea. I want to see if these plant’s phenologys overlap enough to potentially get enough of their pollen on Echinacea. Below is a link to my proposal. Also there is a great link to a list of indices in plant reproductive ecology that I came across while doing some research on the web.

If you have any questions or suggestions about my proposal please don’t hesitate to ask/tell.

proposal E.A.docx

Phenology indices.pdf

Outline for Pollinator Efficiency Experiment

Hello everyone!
For those of you who aren’t familiar with me, I’m Katie. I attend Lakeland College in WI. I’m going to be a Junior this year majoring in Biology, and I’m excited to be writing my first FLOG entry 🙂

Here is a file link to my outline of the research I will be doing this summer! If you have any questions or possible additions to the experiment, do not hesitate to comment!

revised proposal.docx

Wireless printer connection

Hi all,
I have finally figured out how to connect to the printer via the wireless network on a PC. To make sure your computer will be able to access the printer on the network you must do the following:

1) Install the drivers for the LaserJet 2300L. I used the PCL6 driver and it seemed to work fine.
2) Once you have the drivers installed, go to control panel and click on Add Hardware (you must be connected to the wireless network to do this step).
3) When it asks, select that you have already connected the new hardware.
4) Scroll to the very bottom of the next list that appears to where it says “Add a new hardware device.”
5) Then select “Install the hardware that I manually select from a list.”
6) Select “Printers.”
7) Select “Create a new port” and have it be a standard TCP/IP port.
8) Click “next” until it asks you to enter the printers IP address, which is 10.0.0.3

The application should now be fairly straightforward. At some point you will be asked it you wish to share the printer, select no. You may also print a test copy to make sure that you are connected to the printer.

Let me know if you have questions.
Ian

Welcome back!

Happily I am back in the Kensington Town Hall- all is well.
For the new in the crew – I teach 9-12 science at Great Plains Lutheran High in Watertown, SD. It is just over a 130 miles away. I am on my 2nd summer at Team Echinacea and will be here Mondays and Tuesdays (typically) to help the project and work on my own investigations.

I am amazed at the difference between the stages of growth throughout the several remnants and the SPP (Staffanson Prairie Preserve) this year compared to last. I would venture it is about 2-3 weeks farther along than it was last year at this time. It is different to see SPP without being burned this spring. The Hjelm house is seeing improvements as well.
GREG

Early 2010 census on Local Adaptation experiment

Yesterday, Janelle G. and Shelby F. helped me do the May census on the Hegg Lake plot of my local adaptation experiment. There were some surprises, including 3 or 4 NEW seedlings!

Another surprise was a visit from this fawn.

Another interesting discovery was a cluster of egg sacs. Anybody know what critter would leave these?

Today and tomorrow we plan to census the two South Dakota plots that are part of this experiment.

Year-old Echinacea youngster

With the early spring we’ve been having in Minnesota, I was curious about whether the Echinacea plants were sprouting. My husband and I made a day-trip out to Douglas County last Saturday (May 1). I did a quick check of my crossing experiment plot at Hegg Lake. I found some of the toothpicks we used to mark seedlings last summer, along with some of the plants–which are now a year old. I plan to do a complete census in another couple of weeks.

We also stopped by the common garden. Here’s one of the plants–already quite a bit of growth on the first of May.

A little pollen poll

Hey team,

Things have settled down a bit and I’ve started work again on the great pollen challenge! I have ten locations for each of ~150 slides, and for each location I have been recording the count of pollen grains, as well as the number of species as best I can tell (I have also taken notes with descriptions of pollen in each location). My goals at this stage are to get better at recognizing pollen grains of the same species in multiple photos and to get a feel for the diversity and amount of pollen on the pollinators we caught. I’d also like to see if there’s any pollen load size/diversity consistency within a pollinator species.

I have started looking at the male Melissodes sp. and so far it looks like about half of them carry no pollen at all, but some of them have multiple grains at each location.

My question for you is… What makes an insect a ‘pollinator’ in the context of this study? We are focusing on pollinators, and are not including insects that we caught but know are not effective pollinators (ex. syrphid flies), so there needs to be some way to distinguish between other effective and non-effective pollinators. I have thought about making a cutoff like, say, in order for an insect to be a ‘pollinator’ it must have one grain of pollen per location. That way insects that happen to be carrying one grain of pollen (total) but that aren’t really pollinators wouldn’t be counted as pollinators in this study. However, any cutoff seems very arbitrary. It almost seems better to include anything that we know carried pollen, even one grain.

But what about those male Melissodes sp.? If some individuals carry no pollen and others carry quite a bit, do they all count as pollinators, or just the ones that carried pollen?

If you have any ideas, please put them in the comments!

Amy’s poster

Here’s a poster I presented at the Evolution 2009 symposium at the University of Nebraska-Kearney, September 2-4, 2009. The poster describes my local adaptation experiment, and results of the early summer seedling searches at my three experimental sites.
DykstraPosterEvolution2009UNK.pptx