The Echinacea Project

Stipa spartea seed picture

Below is one of the scans of Stipa seeds collected from Douglas County. This particular set of seeds was collected from a plant at Staffenson Prairie Preserve. The seeds themselves are pointed towards the left side of the image, and extending from them are the long awns that give Stipa it’s common name (porcupine grass). At this stage, they look less like quills, though, because they have dried and started to coil (click on the picture to see it full resolution and you can actually observe the coils and lots of other neat features of the seed, like hair and a dagger tip!). Out in nature, the coiling action would allow the seeds to attach to a disperser or to drill themselves into the ground in preparation for overwintering and germinating the next spring. We’ll be scanning all of the seeds we collected (an estimated 3,000+ seeds from 431 plants), making digital measurements of seed length and width, and planting around 2,500 of them interspersed with Echinacea in the common garden.

Greetings from the Lab…

Hi, Team Echinacea —

Its Diedre and Jake with an update from the lab at the Chicago Botanic Garden.

In spite of several setbacks, including a crowded lab and a power failure that shut the lab down for an entire day, we’ve been able to create a lot of data. Currently, we have ten microsatellite primers working which we use for paternity and genetic diversity analysis.

Recently we’ve been able to up our extractions to over 150 samples a week and 10 PCR’s a day! Jake and I started extracting the samples that Jennifer and I took in Minnesota several weeks ago. Jake is using these for his poster on population structure. He will be looking at whether there is interbreeding or inbreeding among the nine remenant populations we sampled (East of Riley, Anenson, Steven’s Approach, Landfill, Railroad Crossing, Staphenson Prairie Preserve, KJ, and Ness). Jake has already found some interesting results with the use of Structure and FStat.

The poster I am working on will look at the diversity of pollen donors with regard to flowering on individual and population levels.

Here are some pictures of our work in the lab:

Jake and I making DNA extractions a little more fun than they already are through use of our artistic talents.

Some preliminary results for Jake’s project.

Planting Stipa in CG

We are going to plant Stipa spartea seeds into the common garden. Here is a
file with target locations for ~2600 seeds. The seeds will be planting in ~269 batches. Here’s a list of the batches: allStipaStarts.csv Sometime before we plant, Caroline will share a photo of one of those Stipa seeds.

FNC and Coreopsis pollinators

Here’s some of the work I’ve done with organizing my data. I still need to figure out how to organize it to be able to analyze it, so this is mostly just preliminary work. I have about 2 weeks to put this all together….any help/advice is appreciated because right now, the data I have is a little overwhelming. There are 3 sheets in this document.
Ech Guide to Co-Fl Sp.xls

For next week, it looks like the weather should hold up for Tues and Thurs to be able to do pollinator observations. So we will need to flag the sites on Monday and have everything ready to go for Tuesday. Remember, you ALWAYS record something for each observation you make, regardless of whether or not you observed/caught a pollinator. Select No for poll. observed and No for pollinator caught if this is the case. Some things I wanted to clear up for people helping with FNC:
>If you reach 100 when counting inflorescences, stop and record >100.
>When recording the species within 10m, you will no longer put this into a memo. Instead you will always select pl A, record 0 for infl ct, and in the field of quadrants, select the fifth option called “within 10m”.
>Review the guide to co-flowering sp for how to count infl or print one up and ask me if you have questions.
>If you come across a new species that isn’t in the list of species in the form, record in the notes not only the species but also a brief description of how you counted inflorescences.
Thanks!

Here’s some of the pollinators I saw on Coreopsis near Hegg Lake. They seemed to only be pollinating Coreopsis although there were other species like Achillea, Amorpha, and Echinacea around.

Orchid hunting trip

On Friday all of us except Greg went on a trip to a mesic prairie 3 hours away to help Gretel look for orchids. We split into 3 groups of 3 and flagged the flowering plants within the various treatment grids.

The Western Fringed Prairie Orchid, Pratanthera praeclara a threatened species. The first orchid I’ve seen in the wild!

Allegra, Amanda, Daniel, Caroline, Amy, Stuart–it was pretty cold for mid-July!

Mountain mint–Pycnanthemum sp. It was really neat to see some different species found in the mesic prairie, as well as some familiar ones. Some others plants we saw were Liatris, Rudbeckia hirta, Apocynum, Lilium philadelphicum,, Asclepias incarnata, A. speciosa, and Campanula. Below is another mint, whose name I can’t remember:

Thanks Gretel for letting us help!

Life with Team Echinacea

Hello all!

This is Daniel with another update on what team Echinacea has been up to in the past week. Allegra, Stuart and I have become what I like to call the “Staffanson Crew”, and we are responsible for doing phenology at Staffanson every other day. Today we got the time down to about 2 hours and 20 minutes, from 3.5 hours originally. The process was made a lot more efficient by splitting up sections and giving everyone a separate checklist. Of course, the temperature was almost 40 below, so that was slightly unpleasant. Add the wind and the fact that I was only wearing 2 thin layers, and you have a recipe for hypothermia. However, I persevered, thinking of my avocado and sausage sandwiches waiting for me at the Hjelm house.

The pollinator project has been going along well, with Kate, Amanda and Mimi hard at working sorting out the oodles of data they have obtained. Greg and Kate are based in what I like to call the “Basement of Oppression”, working on making slides and taking pollen photos. Amanda is pinning bees and creating agar slides with the different pollen loads, then photographing them. Finally, Mimi is working on sorting out all the different types of flowering plants found at each sites. Meanwhile, who knows what Amy and Caroline are up to? Reviewing papers and entering data most likely, tasks far beyond the comprehension of we undergrads.

In my case, I have been searching for the different plants in the common garden that we identified as having spittle. I spent all afternoon in the common garden yesterday, and it was a ton of fun, especially since I saw so many interesting things. The most interesting thing of all though, was watching a bunch of ants pick up and move an aphid that was sitting on a leaf. The aphid may have been dead or alive (alive would be so cool!), but since I was silly enough to forget my camera, I guess I’ll never know.

Most of the plants I looked at have aphids on them, but I will need to wait until I finish looking at them all before I draw any conclusions. Meanwhile, our transect searches are done until next week. However, I have found aphids on many of the plants I saw during our Staffanson searches, so I remain hopeful!