Our research was featured in the Grant County Herald this summer.
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So far this year, we have sadly not been able to have volunteers in the lab due to the continuing threat of COVID-19. However, over the last few months, we made quite a bit of progress on the remnant Echinacea harvests from 2020 and 2021. In the fall, we had help from volunteers, students from Lake Forest College, and externs from Carleton College. Thanks for your help! In January, Sophia finished cleaning the last head from 2021, which was an exciting accomplishment. To track our progress in the lab, I created an R script to visualize the various steps of the ACE process for each batch of Echinacea. The figures for rem2020 and rem2021 are included here. Hopefully, this method will work for the cg harvests as well. The ACE stages are listed along the x-axis, and the number of Echinacea heads are on the y-axis. The light blue shows how much we have completed, and the dark blue shows what remains to be done. The small numbers on each bar indicate the corresponding number of heads, and the width of the bars is roughly proportional to the amount of time each step takes. Along the top, the dates indicate the last day that the totals for each stage were updated. The script to create these graphs can be found here: echinaceasandbox/oop/trackAceProgressTest.R This summer we harvested seed pods from 25 Green Milkweed (Asclepias viridiflora) plants in the study area. Green Milkweed is uncommon and seems to be declining in our study area. This species prefers similar habitat to Echinacea. Plants tend to be sporadically distributed across dry prairies on steep hillsides, sandy soils, and well-drained gravelly areas. Our experience has been that flowering plants often fail to produce seed. We rarely find more than a handful of plants that produce pods in a given year.
After harvesting and drying seeds, Jared cleaned seed by removing their fluffy coma. Jared then counted all the seeds and randomly selected a minimum of 30 seeds for x-raying. X-rays revealed variation. Some ovules lacked an embryo , others had whole, intact embryos. Many ovlues fell somewhere in between. They contained embryos that were undersized, shriveled, or fragmented. There was no external evidence of seed predation. The proportion of full ovules ranged from 0 to 100 percent. We are not sure whether “partials” reflect resource limitation and seed abortion, a form of late-acting self-incompatibility, or something else entirely. We are doing some research to help us interpret the biology underlying these patterns.
After cleaning, counting, and classifying, Jared prepared a subset of Green Milkweed seed for germination. CBG’s production greenhouse will germinate and grow 392 milkweed seedlings representing 15 maternal lines. We will plant these seedlings in an area south of P8. Although these plants grow slowly, our hope is that they will be an excellent resource for investigating milkweed pollination in a couple years. We also hope to harvest seed from these plants and include Green Milkweed in our seed mixes for restoration! In the first two weeks of being at the Echinacea Project Lab, I have become well acquainted with parts of the ACE protocol. I have done counting, cleaning, re-checking, randomizing, and scanning. In my first week, Alex showed me how to clean echinacea heads. During the cleaning process, we press the dried echinacea head into a glass pyrex tray. Usually, the achenes will fall out. However, i’ve gotten some really tough flower heads where the achenes were firmly attached to the bracts and other parts of the head. Alex taught me a good method to gently grab onto the achene with tweezers and wiggle them out of the head. After adapting that hack, things went much smoother. The contents of each head get separated into two envelopes. The achenes are stored in the achene folder and the bracts and dust are stored in the chaff folder. The achenes are ready to be scanned after a round of rechecking to ensure all achenes are accounted for! I found it fascinating that there is so much variation in achenes between different echinacea heads. On the other hand, there are many similarities between achenes from the same flowering head. I also realized that handling achenes is a very delicate process because they have a tendency to fly away. I was very impressed with the organization system of all the achenes going through the ACE protocol. Different boxes and labels indicate which stage the achenes are currently at in a certain box. Next week, I will be developing some questions for my own research project. I am excited to start my journey to uncover the secrets of echinacea!
Echinacea Project 2022 I am a biology major and environmental studies minor at Lake Forest College. After I graduate in Fall’23, I hope to continue working in research labs before I embark on my grad school journey.
I have a wide range of academic interests including, experimental philosophy, neuroscience, environmental justice and conservation. I am an aspiring research scientist and hope to attend grad school for cognitive neuroscience in the future.
I am from Shanghai, China. While growing up, I’ve lived between Shanghai and Chicago. Besides academics, I love nature adventures! This summer I am hoping to learn more about foraging and identifying fungus. I also enjoy swimming, biking and watching theater productions. Team Echinacea continued the aphid addition and exclusion experiment started in 2011 by Katherine Muller. The original experiment included 100 plants selected from exPt01 which were each assigned to have aphids either added or excluded through multiple years. The intention is to assess the impact of the specialist herbivore Aphis echinaceae on Echinacea fitness. In 2021, the aphid addition and exclusion project was conducted by Allie Radin with occasional help from other field crew members (often Emma Reineke). They located 26 living exclusion plants and 17 living addition plants. The experiment was conducted from July 9th to July 23rd, with the final visit consisting only of searching for aphids. No aphids were seen or moved in exPt01 this year. Once again, there were very few aphids (actually, none) in exPt01. This is the second year in a row of missing aphids, raising other questions about where the aphids have gone, let alone their impact on the Echinacea plants. Allie and the team searched the experimental plot thoroughly to make sure no potential aphid hiding spot was left unturned. This included large plants from this year and last year, this year’s flowering plants, and plants which had aphids in previous years. Despite low aphid numbers, other insects such as beetles and thrips were present in the plot.
You can read more about the aphid addition and exclusion experiment, as well as links to prior flog entries mentioning the experiment, on the background page for this experiment. In 2019, Team Echinacea transplanted over 1400 Echinacea angustifolia plants from three local prairies to 12 plots at the West Central Area (WCA) High School, also known as exPt10. Since then, the West Central Area High School instructors and students have collaborated with members of Team Echinacea to gather data and plan the treatments of the plots, anything from burning to assessing plant fitness. In the fall, WCA students do an individual investigation using the Echinacea plots and then create a poster showing the process and conclusion of their investigation.
Having the Echinacea plots located at West Central Area School has provided many opportunities for the students to be involved in relevant research helping the Echinacea Project and doing individual projects. The plots at the school have also been used for additional research by Echinacea Project team members. Specifically, in the summer of 2021, graduate student Drake Mullett started a research project on prairie parasitic plants at exPt10 and will continue for the next few summers. Amy Waananen also continued an ongoing research project on Echinacea plants’ gene flow in exPt10. In May 2021, Team Echinacea conducted a prescribed burn at exPt10. Read more about the burn here.
Team Echinacea was busy this summer! Over the last few weeks, we have been posting updates on projects from summer 2021. Here is the complete list.
Experiments with 2021 updates:
Tallgrass prairie once covered vast expanses of western Minnesota, but it has been almost entirely converted to agriculture, and only fragmented patches remain, often along roadsides. Insecticide use has also dramatically increased since the early 2000s, especially the use of neonicotinoids. In addition, pollinator populations are declining worldwide, likely due to this loss in habitat quantity and quality. In our study area, student Ben Lee found that pollinator habitat decreased by 6.8 km2 from 2006 to 2014. More research is needed to understand how pollinator communities are changing in the fragmented prairies of western Minnesota. Native bees are critical for pollinating both native plants and commercial crops, and many plants depend on specialized pollinators, and so the decline of these pollinators may threaten the long-term survival of native plant populations as well as human food systems. Therefore, the Pollinators on Roadsides study, also known as the Yellow Pan Trap project (YPT), is measuring changes in native bee diversity and abundance from 2004-2019 and investigating how the amount of agricultural land and grassland corresponds to the nearby bee community. One hypothesis is that all bee species are declining in abundance equally. Alternatively, some bee populations may be shrinking while others take advantage of the decreased competition and become more prevalent, which would change the community composition. We hope to find out!
This study is based on the original 2004 experiment by Wagenius and Lyon, who studied the relationship between characteristics of land and the abundance and diversity of pollinators. In 2004, 2017, 2018, and 2019, Team Echinacea set out yellow pan traps at 20-40 locations along roadsides in Solem Township which were surrounded by varying amounts of agricultural land. We collected the bees that fell into the traps and stored them at the Chicago Botanic Garden where patient volunteers pinned all the specimens. Many thanks to all the people who have contributed to this project over the past 18 years! After a hiatus due to COVID-19, the Yellow Pan Trap project (YPT) is finally back on the road! In December 2021, we completed an inventory of all 1,988 YPT bees and delivered them in 8 cases to Zach Portman at the University of Minnesota. Volunteers Mike Humphrey and Anna Stehlik previously grouped the specimens by genus, and Zach will now identify the bees to species. Mia Stevens is working on a preliminary community analysis, and Alex Carroll is tackling the GIS landscape analysis. Working with data that has been compiled by many different people over numerous years has been both exciting and challenging. Many thanks to intern Erin Eichenberger for leaving clear documentation from 2020. There are still a few problems that need to be resolved. During inventory, we discovered 9 pairs of duplicate specimen id numbers (SPIDs) from 2017, and the specimen labels will need to be changed. In addition, some of the date and trap numbers on the specimen labels were edited in pencil, and these should be cross-checked with the existing dataset.
You can read more information about the pollinators on roadsides project here. This summer, Team Echinacea investigated whether there was a difference in pollinator fidelity in bees caught in eight burned remnant prairies and eighteen unburned remnant prairies. This experiment used the proportion of Echinacea angustifolia pollen carried by bees as they foraged on an E. angustifolia capitulum as a proxy for fidelity. The 2021 bee collectors included the entirety of the team, and bees were collected between June 28th and July 20th. Upon visiting a remnant prairie, we attempted to capture at least three bees of the taxa Augochlorella aurata, Agapostemon virescens, and Halictus spp. We removed the pollen from the body and scopae separately and created microscope slides which were later used to identify the species carried by the bees based on morphology. After wiping them of their pollen, the bees were released back to the sites where they were caught.
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