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This post is long overdue! I thought I would give a little update on what I’ve been up to here at the Chicago Botanic Garden.
So to remind those who may have forgotten who I am and what my project is all about.. My name is Andrea. I attend McGill University where I study botany (with Allegra!) and over the past two years I’ve developed a very strong and deep DEEP love for life in the soil. Don’t get me wrong, I love studying plants, but at this phase of my life soil organisms (namely fungi) dominate. It started with an Introduction to Fungi course I took two years ago that involved a series of guided and independent mushroom forays and culminated in the production of a mycological portfolio. I then took a biology of fungi course that was much more thorough and only confirmed for me just how awesome fungi really are. Last summer I was lucky enough to have the chance to work as an REU intern with Louise Egerton-Warburton, soil scientist at the Garden. My research looked at how microbial communities respond to buckthorn invasion and subsequent restoration. I’m back this summer to continue research on that project and as well to start looking at the mycorrhizal communities associated with the Echinacea populations in the remnants of interest in Minnesota.
The main goal of my experiment is to see if there is a relationship between plant genotype and mycorrhizal community. At the beginning of the summer Stuart helped me select nine families in the ’97 common garden and from each family around 9 individual plants were randomly chosen.To collect the mycorrhizal fungi I use mesh baggies that have two polycarbonate membranes secured at the bottom. One of these membranes I will stain and permanently fix onto slides for the purposes of determining hyphal length. This will give me an overall idea of mycorrhizal density and colonization. Hopefully I will have time to extract DNA from the other membrane to get a closer look at who’s really there.
To install the bags, I basically wedge the bag carefully into the ground near the roots of select plants so that the membranes sit at least 4 cm below the surface. Over time, the mycorrhizal fungi growing near the roots will run across these membranes and have no trouble meandering through its pores. Little do they know that it’s a trap!! Around each plant I placed one bag and waited about three weeks. Recently, I retrieved those bags and I’ve spent the past few days making slides. I promised to post pictures so here are a couple exhibiting some spores and hyphae!
(Image taken with 40X objective)
For some reason it won’t let me load more than one photo so I will try again later.
More updates coming soon!
-Andrea
Hello everyone! My name is Mimi Jenkins and I’m an REU student with Chicago Botanic Gardens. I am from Pittsburgh, PA where I am a senior (one more semester!) at the University of Pittsburgh double majoring in Environmental studies and French lang/lit and a certificate in Global studies. This is my first real experience spending more than one day in the Midwest and I love it so far. The wetlands and prairies out here are gorgeous and I feel very lucky to be experiencing a new and exciting place and working with such an interesting group of people on such a worthwhile and fascinating project. I have never been on such a flat land or in such a small town, but the flat topography makes for nice biking (hoping I can get my hands on a bike soon!) and the small town is a nice break from the city for the summer. I arrived in Chicago two weeks ago and after an introductory week for the REU program doing lab work on soil samples and such (not my cup o’ tea), I met Stuart, took pictures with the help of Jake Friedman of some of the Echinacea pollinators and visitors that are pinned and in boxes at CBG, and did a little research on the nesting habits of bees.
Here is the protocol we came up with for the picture-taking:Protocol for Taking Pictures of Insect Specimens.docx
Here is some of the info I found on nesting of bees commonly found on Echinacea:
Echinacea Pollinators nesting.docx
I am really excited about this field season and I wish I could stay longer! I am really interested in improving my plant and bee identification skills on the prairie, as well as my knowledge of statistics in analyzing data and applied ecology in general. I also hope that this experience will help me to hone in on what I want to focus on for graduate schools in a year or two. I am currently trying to think about what exactly I would like to focus on because everything sounds so cool but I am limited to less than 6 weeks of research so it must be a pretty precise question, such as: does one family or species of bee act as a more effective pollinator for Echinacea than others using the style persistence method, or what co-flowering species are the pollinators pollinating that also land on Echinacea by observing pollinators on other plants or looking at foreign pollen on Echinacea heads. I would like to work in the common garden and in remnant populations to get a good sense of how these questions might differ depending on the community diversity of the remnant and the health of the Echinacea population.
I went out wandering yesterday and I think some of the locals thought I was a crazy person for walking on the side of the road but until I can bike, I will explore by foot. I turned onto the first dirt road on the right off of Kensington Ave and found this pretty hillside prairie remnant at the end of the road. I wanted to go further, but the electric fence kept me from continuing. I saw a patch of something yellow flowering off in the distance. Along the path of the dirt road between two corn fields I saw what I think was brome grass, prairie rose, common milkweed, alfalfa and clover, and some others like thistles that I couldn’t identify. I saw a big white bird that Stuart told me today was an American egret. I also saw some more of those cool turquoise dragonflies that are in the common garden. I regret not bringing my camera with me because the view at the end of the dirt road was so pretty–there were relatively few trees and you could gently rolling green hills for miles.
Hey team Echinacea,
Lani and Denise officially finished their REU internships last Friday and are both back in the California bay area. They both worked really hard on their projects and ended up with some really neat studies. At the end of their internship they created and presented a poster for a research symposium. Their posters turned out really well and I wanted to share them with you. Below are links to each of their posters…enjoy!
Lani’s poster: Download file
Denise’s poster: Download file
Hi all,
Lani, Denise and I are back in Chicago safe and sound. After such a rainy start to the day overall the drive was smooth and even included a Disney sing along. My reunion with my puppy, Raven, was filled with lots of jumping and tail wagging.
Photo of Raven from before I left for Minnesota…tried to take one tonight but she was too hyper.
Ben, Lecia, and Julie, I had a great time working with all of you and I wish you the best of luck in your future ecological endeavors. Everyone else I will see you back in Chicago or in Minnesota in the near future. Have a great rest of the summer Team Echinacea and we will keep you posted on our progress here in Chicago.
Jennifer
well I just took a shower. Showers are a big event for me because recently at least they are very infrequent. I suppose I should start taking showers more frequently because my current living situation is more civilized than when I am at school and everyone else takes showers more or less everyday so … well there are many reasons why i should take more than one shower a week here but if you want to know more i think that you should ask me. or maybe you should ask why I think it is reasonable to only take one shower a week. Anyway my hair and beard should be different now because the last time I bathed was last friday at a indoor water park in Ohio in heavily chlorinated water. My beard and hair is naturally curly/wavy but the chlorine straightened it out a bit. Let me tell you: It takes a long time to clean several weeks of oil, grease,and dirt off of you. I don’t know if anyone is still reading this but as you might be able to tell this blog is not about Echinacea at all; up until now that is. But none of our lives are completely consumed by Echinacae, except possibly stuart’s, so you should not be surprised by the varied content of this blog, and/or field log
and now for something completely different
I’m trying to stay until $13 a week for food this summer because at least I heard that that is the amount that we can get reimbursed. I calculated today that that is less than $1 per meal -in fact it is less than 62 cents per meal. I’ve spent a large chunk of it already (this being the latter portion of the first week) so if limit my spending to $5 next week and $10 for the remaining weeks i should come close to my goal
I’ve started to keep a running tally of all the ticks that i’ve found crawling on me or embedded in me. So far after the 5th day here and the 4th day of work i’ve found 15 ticks on me -3 of which were attached. I just realized that i’m missing a day so those numbers are approximate. Still that’s a lot of ticks and several more than other people have gotten. i seem to be a tick magnet. Also a mosquito magnet but not as to as an unusual extant. I guess that it’s not really worse than if i were back at the Homestead, where I perpetually had a mild case of poison ivy and was continually scratching myself and getting caught on the multiflora rose that has taken over there.
I just got a notice that i’m getting paid for the Alumni Reunion Weekend that I was part of staff for back at Denison tomorrow. i thought that I had already gotten paid for that so now i’ll actually have some spending money, but i don’t think i’ll be needing it very soon anyway.
i bought a bag of cherries at the grocery store the other day. They were in a cart and all in bags that prominently said 99 cents apparently because they were very ripe. Anyway the cashier rang them as $3.99 a pound so i ended up paying more than $10 for the bag, which i didn’t realize until 2 days afterward when most of the cherries were already gone. i’m going to go in with the receipt next time i go to the grocery store to try to get my money back. That might not be for a while though. Oh well I have to go to bed. Work is at 8 tomorrow because the Echinacae already. There are lots of things to do.
i didn’t get to the completely different stuff. too bad
maybe tomorrow
19 June 2007
Andy McCall reporting here. I drove from OH to Minnesota last Friday. It was a trying commute for a number of reasons. After preparing for the summer and trying to rid myself of a strange contagion I may have contracted in Costa Rica last month I took off from Granville, OH to Chicago, where I was to meet Stuart.
All was well until I hit the hellish highway snag that is Chicagoland. I was not expecting the horrors that I encountered. I WAS however, prepared for tolls on US 90, bringing about ten dollars in change. The first toll came to a grand total of 15 cents. I didn’t know that anything, even candy, cost fifteen cents anymore. I used to buy subsidized milk in elementary school for that amount. The next toll was 50 cents – OK, the next toll was 100 meters later and was $2.50. I submit this question to you, dear reader, “What is up with that?��? Why wasn’t it $3.00 in the first place? – I didn’t even see a darn exit in between the tolls.
OK, enough about tolls. I called Stuart telling him of the construction on I-90, suggesting that I was 40 minutes away. Three hours later I arrived in Highland Park, right across the street from the Chicago Botanic Garden. We stayed for about 30 minutes, chatting through the din of the cicadas that had emerged en masse in the Chicago area. Stuart drove my car and we talked of many things, as we had 6hrs in the car.
After arriving in MN, I went down to Northfield for my 10th College Reunion. It was grand, and saw many a familiar face. I also got to visit Carleton’s own prairie restoration, where I had worked years before under the tutelage of Dr. Mark McKone. I took several pictures of prairie plants and their associated insects. From the prairie you can even see Carleton’s giant windmill. St. Olaf has copied us and now has a big one right as you enter Northfield on Hwy 19. I picked up Colin Venner at the MSP airport and then we were on our way!
Heliopsis 
Amorpha canescens
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