The Echinacea Project

Diedre and Jake’s posters

I wanted to share Diedre and Jake’s REU posters with everyone…they both did a great job!
Poster-DRfinal.pdf
JJF Poster-final.pdf

Pollinating Cirsium

Here’s what needs to be done tomorrow, around 10am, for pollinating Cirsium altissimum at Hegg Lake.

I will provide a clipboard with a data sheet, map, and pollinating tools. Plant numbers are on flags to the south of the plants. Plant 9-7 has a yellow twist-tied head that is flowering right now. It will need to be selfed. Yellow tt heads on plants 9-16,-6, and -8 may be flowering tomorrow. If so, they also need to be selfed. Plant 9-19 had two bagged yellow heads. One is done flowering, the other may be flowering tomorrow. If the second one is flowering, it should be selfed. 9-26 with a red tt may be flowering. If so, it needs to be crossed. Cross pollen can be obtained from 9-14, which has a white tt and is blooming now, or 9-21, which may be flowering tomorrow.

To pollinate the heads, use a q-tip provided. For selfing, just rub the q-tip over the anthers to collect the pollen, then brush the q-tip on the stigmas. The pollen is very sticky and will easily stick to the q-tip. For crossing, rub a q-tip on the anthers of a pollen donor (white tt). Place in a labeled glass vial, transport to the head to be crossed, and rub the stigmas with the q-tip. Be sure to write down which plant was used as a pollen donor.

software for counting seeds in images

We have been very happy using ImageJ to count Echinacea seeds. ImageJ is free, open-source, public domain software. It runs on any platform.

We have also used ImageTool. This program is free and runs on Windows only.

Histogram of pollen sizes

Here’s a histogram of pollen sizes (~30 grains per species) from 3 individual plants of Coreopsis palmata, Echinacea angustifolia, and Heliopsis helianthoides.

Greg outlined the methods taking the measurements here. Greg, what software program did you use?

Mimi’s Last Day- long ago, but not forgotten!

You WISH you were eating these cakes!!!!!!

We miss you, Mimi!

You too, Greg!

pollen storage data

Here is a file with the pollen storage data (excluding Stuart’s data on the 48 hour style persistence).

pollen storage data sheet.xls

We pollinated 3 plants in the common garden that were still flowering. Each plant had 3 treatments of stored Echinacea pollen; ambient temperature, frozen, and refrigerated. The frozen and refrigerated pollen caused shriveling, the ambient temperature treatment did not.

How many do you see?

Hey All,
Long time no post, I know. Things certainly have been busy around here. As you all probably know, I finished making slides a while back – 372 slides total. WooHoo!!

Now, onto the next step, taking pictures of these slides. I took my very first pictures today, just a couple to get the hang of things, they are attached to this post. From my fiddling around today, I can see that this is going to be a lot more work than I thought. First off, the pollen is hard to find, it’s not all at the same level of view, some of them are on top of the stigma and then they’re really hard to see. Also, it’s challenging to focus in enough to where I can ID pollen grains. Stuart suggested working on a random sample of my slides for the rest of the summer, and completing them this fall at the CBG. The only issue there is the change of machinery, but hopefully we can figure something out.

As for the rest, I think I’ll be taking 1-2 shots of the entire style, and labeling them thus: stylevialID_site_date/time_A# – so A1, A2, etc. Then I’ll zoom in and proceed to take pictures at sites B through F on the style, and for each change in focus will be another number. The question is whether I should attempt to get a good sense of the exact number of pollen grains on the stigmas or try to ID the pollen types. I’d like to be able to do both, but I think for this summer at least, I’ll try to get a handle on the former rather than deal with the later.

On that note, Caroline suggested using a clicker to count the number of pollen in a picture, and that seems like an excellent suggestion. Does anyone know if we’ve got one?

Anyway, enjoy the pictures that I took so far:

-Kate Monster

Files for Gretel to make visor forms AND a reminder for Stuart

Here are two spreadsheets with information to be made into visor forms.
The first is a list of Echinacea positions we will measure from, in order to plant Stipa seeds. The relevant worksheet is the first one. In the visor form, I would like to be able to see row, position, Echinacea plant status and a column for notes. Breaking this list into multiple forms would be fine.

Complete list of Stipa positions81409.xls

The second is information for the “Next generation rescue” August seedling refind. I would like block, row, position and number of seedlings in May visible and would like number toothpicks, number toothpicks with no seedling, number new seedlings, longest leaf lengths and notes as editable fields.

Nextgenresc-For Aug 09 visor form.xlsx

And finally, Stuart, could you check out some Stipa bunches in Staffenson and decide how close we could comfortably plant seeds next to the Echinacea in the garden?

Allegra’s pollination data .csv file

Here is my dataset that I am working on analyzing in R as a .csv file.

halverson.data.091.csv

Stuart, here is my R script so far:

halverson.data.analysis1.R

I made new columns in the .csv spreadsheet for the factors and levels we discussed. I will work on a list of hypotheses to test. I think I changed the definition of “y” when I did my 24 hour analysis. Can I give “y” a different name for each analysis? Or does the code need to read a defined “y” each time?

Thanks for the help and check out the graph of 24 hours and the summary m2.

Allegra

Pollen measurements – bad and good news.

Here are the data on the three pollen types and the protocol for measuring.
I used the same plant/pollen from each plant and measured at least 30 different pollen grains from each. I didn’t use any pollen if its pole faced forward – only if it was sideways.

Bad news – the Ech. ang. and Heli. heli. are very close. Good news – maybe the pollinators and plants can’t tell them apart either.

Book1.xlsx

PS – I am in SE Minn and the Monarda Sunflower and Miss. Goldenrod are in full bloom all over.

Protocol for slide image recording and measuring.docx

Categories

Experiments