Last Friday, I was dispatched by Stuart to find the number of plants/ achenes planted in each experimental plot, along with the number alive as of a recent year (2017-2019, based on the plot). Although records of some plots were a bit harder to come across that others, I was able to compile data from each plot (besides p10 – planted 2019 – data coming soon). This would not have been possible without the help of Gretel, so thanks GK! I have attached a small datasheet with the survival data.
In the history of the Echinacea Project, the team has sown 31,888 Echinacea viable achenes in experimental plots. There were many more sown that likely did not have a seed. Team members found 3634 seedlings from these seeds, not including Amy D’s experimental plot 3 and remnant seedling refinds. The team has planted 18,869 Echinacea seedlings in experimental plots, not including p10 – planted at West Central Area HS in 2019. Finally, 7090 Echinacea are currently alive in the experimental plots!
Happy hunting season! We donned our stylish orange vests for a morning assessing demography and surveying plants at our last large prairie remnant. Lately there’s been all kinds of caterpillars out and about, including lots of woolly bears (one of which had no brown saddle at all, foretelling the harshest winter possible—gulp!)
Hopefully this little guy is a lucky charm against woolly bear omens
We found plants 200 and 201 both flowering—just as they were in 1995, when they were first tagged. Though 200 produced only one dud this year, 201 prevailed with three lovely heads—just as it did when it last flowered, in 2016!
Riley demonstrates the appropriate amount of enthusiasm for finding plants older than him
At lunch we enjoyed the rest of Stuart’s cake with ice cream, a lovely treat for a hot afternoon. Stuart may have voyaged back to Chicago, but we continue to enjoy the rewards of his efforts!
Posting this photo before eating dinner was a Bad Idea. Boy am I hungry now.
After finishing up in the remnants Riley and I returned to P1 to continue measuring. We collected grass seeds to broadcast this fall, and helped some common milkweed disperse.
Watching the seeds rise on what seemed like no breeze at all was pretty magical
After the excitement of yesterday’s goat herding adventure, Riley and I were happy to return to life and work as normal today, but that didn’t stop us from checking in with our favorite mischief-makers first.
Basil photobombs Riley’s pic with the newly dubbed Cream Cheese
We knocked out a small demo site before tackling harvest in P1 and P8 before lunch. After lunch we trucked out to P2 to harvest more heads. Though Echinacea flowering has concluded, the views from the plot are still gorgeous and bright with other flowers.
You can almost smell fall on the way!Riley carefully examines a head and determines that it should be harvestedbefore the whole flowering stalk wanders off
After heading back to Town Hall Riley bid me farewell and took off to the Twin Cities for his brother’s wedding. The mathematically-minded may have worked out that Town Hall’s population currently numbers just one person– me! (Unless you count the 72 ghosts in the basement, of course.) That’s a pretty lonely way to live though, so I convinced Baby the goat to come home with me and rematch for the WWE title.
I’m sure no one will notice the bites missing from the couchFour legs good, two legs [on scooter] better!
Hope you all had a wonderful Monday. Here, at the Echinacea Project, we had to wait a little bit to get our outside work started. It rained all morning and through lunch but very conveniently stopped as the time came to resume the work day. Since the plots were too wet the team decided to pick up with some demography and search for this year’s flowering plants out at Loeffler’s corner.
Throwing it back to this morning, I think it’d be fair to say that a team Echinacea trapped indoors is still a productive team Echinacea. The rainy morning called for computer time, during which many of us made progress on our independent projects and other various jobs. While the team congregated around a table in the main room of Hjelm, I took to the basement to work at my pinning station. I now have over 100 bees pinned and labeled with specimen IDs. I can use the IDs to trace each bee back to the vial and trap that it came from, along with the date it was collected. My next step was to roughly organize the bees by morphospecies(pictured below). The picture does not do them justice, but these bees are COOL! I’m excited to look at them closer and identify the many unique traits that the different species have. Allison Grecco paid us a visit today as well and it was very nice to get to share with her my project update! Best of luck with your master’s Allison!
John also shared with us at lunch, his summer project update. He has a unique opportunity to take what we do at the Echinacea Project in the summer and incorporate it into his teaching at West Central Area High School. He has a lot of fun and engaging activities planned for his students this coming school year. I’m excited for you all to hear/read more about it!
Hello Echination! Hope all is going well for the folks back home reading my flog. For us in Kensington, the week has been full of three things: demography, measuring in p1, and seedling refinds. Although these tasks can be somewhat monotonous, the team is highly efficient at the tasks and we definitely have fun doing them! One of the ways the team has had fun is by visiting the many friends we find near and on Echinacea. Many are large arthropods, but sometimes we get to spend time with cute little froggies! Look at them:
Woah, a hawkmoth caterpillar!My personal not-favorite, a garden spider.A FUNGUS ON BUCKTHORN!?! This is interesting… anyone have thoughts on what it is?
Today, Team Echinacea spent time in the remnant site East Riley finishing up the seedling search that had been conducted there on Tuesday and then doing demography for the site. All but two heads that we found at East Riley had been mowed over- some possibly more. This site is notorious for that problem, but this year it was mowed over more comprehensively than it has before. Yet, the echinacea come back year after year and they still try to flower. They invest resources into a reproductive gamble, put everything out there, and hope for the best outcome. If echinacea can take a chance on themselves year after year, maybe we all could.
It is with a heavy heart that we announce that one of our own, Amy Waananen, has passed from our midst to her other home in the Twin Cities. With the conclusion of flowering looming large, Amy has left us to continue her work at the University of Minnesota. Though some insist we may see her again roaming the remnants in search of plant tissue, I know this to be but a specter of our hopeful, grieving hearts. Town Hall mourns for the loss of our favorite corner-room occupant and master compost de-grossing expert.
And of course, life goes on. Even now, flowers bloom anew in the remnants. Plants first identified decades ago dutifully sprout through the wire loops of their tags and allow us to greet them as old friends. Perhaps next field season we might once again find Amy at Hjelm, syncing her visor, scooping up her clipboard, and striking out for the prairie.
An Echinacea found rays spreading in one of our prairie remnants– a rare treat in mid-late August!
Today, as the Town Hall crew was contemplating our measuring protocol, we realized that our current methods of transporting ourselves down the rows of experimental plots are woefully inefficient. Walking requires that you constantly bend over to check the ground for basal plants and stakes. Crawling puts splinters in your hands and bluestem stalks in your boots. Hopping on one leg may save the airborne ankle from chigger bites, but your ground-bound foot is sure to find a gopher hole. So what does a prairie scientist do, when the time comes to locomote through rows of small plants and tall grass?
Town Hall has the solution: a swing car fleet. The swing car, if you’ve never had the honor of driving one, is a low-riding, 6-wheeled chariot, propelled forward only by your hands on the steering wheel. When we discovered a swing car in a Town Hall closet, the crew knew exactly what we needed to do: test every possible way of driving a swing car to scientifically identify the most efficient method, and assess its utility as a mode of field transportation. Drake demonstrated the remarkably effective “shimmy” method, sidling the chariot back and forth at surprising speed:
Erin, meanwhile, tested the experimental “hang ten” posture, which lets the rider pretend they’re surfing USA, no waves required.
While this method proved to be a wonderful balance exercise, it was woefully inefficient for our transportation purposes, the average distance traveled being -10cm.
To put our swing car to the final test, we had to confirm that operation would be possible in the field. Unfortunately, a thunderstorm outside prevented us from performing this last experiment outside. Instead, we donned our field boots and substituted tall grass duff for shag carpet. A resounding success!
The question of whether swing car riding can outpace walking as the preferred mode of field transportation remains to be tested.
Hello Flognation! Today started with moving Stuart’s herd of goats to a new paddock. Excitingly, there are now 11 goats in the herd! This is 3 more than there were the last time we moved the herd. It raises the questions, “How many goats will Stuart accept into his herd?”, “How many goats would it take to eat all the buckthorn between the bog and p1?”, “How many goats is too many goats?”, “If they chose to storm the Hjelm house, could we stop all of them?”, and “Wait are there only 10 goats inside the fence?” Luckily, all the goats were happy to move into their new buckthorn paradise, possibly with the exception of Baby, one of the newcomer goats who felt more at home with people than goats.
After goat herding, I went to go collect leaf tissue from plants in the remnant populations where I’m studying pollen movement. The rest of the team transitioned into measuring mode and proceeded to power through measuring many rows in p1. In p1, they encountered some exciting wildlife, namely this caterpillar:
After lunch, some of the team continued measuring, while the rest of the group went to collect demo data at Woody’s. Although Chekov was fussy, the demo team persisted and also encountered this important buddy:
