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Hey flog! Amy headed back to the Twin Cities on Friday, which left me alone at the Hoff House. Since I don’t feel risking my life everyday biking to work on 27, I moved into the Andes Tower Hills condo Friday evening. It has new topography (a hill) and new wildlife (Lea’s dogs). Given the general lack of dogs and elevation gain in the past 1.5 months, this is much more similar to my living condition at home (upstate NY). I’m looking forward to fun new adventures with the Andes crew!   On Friday The Echinacea Project saw the end of an era. Long-time team member Riley Thoen had his last day working for the project after 3 summers spent in the field. We started off the morning with phenology in the remnants, with the added goal of looking for purple prairie clover at each of our sites.  During lunch break, we celebrated Riley’s time here with some cake and an eyepatch.  After lunch, we finished measuring all of the inbreeding 2 experiment plants and had an early end to the day. We spent some time eating ice cream bars provided by John and then headed to Elk Lake with some canoes for end-of-work-week and end-of-Riley-working-here activities. Best wishes to Riley as he heads off to grad school!   Today I only heard about what the team was up to from Mia after her epic day that started at 7:15 and ended around 6:30. Sounds like a lot happened in the field today! I heard about phenology, and how their were a few critical visor malfunctions, although it seems we were still able to get the data we need!  I also heard that people started adding and excluding aphids from Echinacea plants in p1, and that some hand crosses happened with hybrid Echinacea in p7!  All in all it seemed like a good day for the team. Back home at Alpha Tango Hotel, I worked on getting the FNC manuscript ready to resubmit. Over the weekend many Team Echinacea members current and past read the draft and gave me valuable feedback. Today I polished everything up and clicked “Submit”! The study examines how heterospecific co-flowering plants and isolation from conspecific mates affects pollination. Specifically, we quantify how these aspects of the floral neighborhood influence four stages of the pollination process: 1) probability of pollinator visitation, 2) pollen on pollinators that visit Echinacea, 3) pollen on Echinacea styles, and 4) style persistence (pollination success). We are excited to submit this manuscript and are hoping for favorable reviews this second time around!   Hello Echination! It’s me again, Riley. I’m finally returning to regular summer flogs, and I am beyond excited to be doing so. As regular flog subscribers may know, I spent the winter with Team Echinacea at the Chicago Botanic Garden, and I have been looking forward to adventures in west-central Minnesota for a while now. I like to think my return to the prairie was as epic as Kurt Angle’s TNA debut. Nonetheless, we had a productive team day today. This morning, Anna M, Mia, and I went out to hybrid exPt7 and exPt9 and flagged the plots for future measuring. It went very smoothly relative to previous years! Additionally, we found a flowering plant in experimental plot 7! We expect it is either an Echinacea pallida plant or a hybrid. I think it may be in the same plant that flowered in 2018 in exPt7. Other team members weeded in exPt1 this morning, and Erin worked on preparing Darwin to stake and shoot plants in the remnants. Finally, Amy W and Emma went to remnants to take demography records on plants that have initiated flowering. We had a fun lunch and headed over to West Central Area High School for an afternoon of meetings. First, we talked about team norms and expectations over Zoom. We started by trying to all Zoom from the same room, but that was a disaster. We decided to split into separate rooms, and the meeting went well thereafter. Finally, we talked as a group (this time, in-person) about COVID-19 expectations and preparedness. Once again, our meeting went well, and we have clearer ground rules to mitigate COVID transmission opportunities. Well, flog readers, thanks for having me! I’ll talk to ya soon!!! Peace out Echination.  Hey flog Today sure was a hot one out there today, well in comparison to how early in the season it is. The theme of the day was cleaning up. We started by cleaning up the flagging system in P1, this meant replacing most of the old flags from last year with clean crisp new ones. This is an extremely important task because it sets the ground work to collect data in P1 for the rest of the season.  Erin and Emma worked on rechecking some confusing data points from last summer. By fixing these confusing points Emma and Erin were able to pick up the data set. A number of team members working on picking up G3 and started on picking up Hjelm house.  Erin headed out to Near Town Hall to check on how the plants are doing out there, she found what is thought to be the last known living plant in the remnant. She reports that it is fairly large and is only a basal plant this year and last flowered in 2018.  We will keep cleaning so that we can have the most accurate and efficient season possible! Until next time, Mia This weekend I traveled to the University of Georgia for a graduate student recruitment event (“Go Dawgs,” as they say,) and stumbled upon Echinacea Project alum Laura Leventhal! We rode on a shuttle from the ATL airport to campus in silence for 2 hours and then, having realized our connection, terrified the other passengers in the last 5 minutes of the journey by jabbering about Team Echinacea, the Hjelm House, goats, phenology and more.  Laura was on the team in 2016 and worked at the Chicago Botanic Garden through the CLM program. Currently she works at UC Davis as a lab manager and is currently interviewing for PhD programs in biology. We had a great time getting to know more about each other in person than we could from reading old flog posts. I found out that Laura heard my undergraduate PI Dr. Joshua Puzey speak at a conference, and that my friend is currently applying to work with a PI at UC Davis whom Laura knows! The world of ecology is, occasionally, delightfully small. Best wishes to Laura as she continues interviewing and I’m crossing my fingers for more Team Echinacea reunions in our travels! This past week, I continued work on multiple projects. I continued to recheck and label cleaned Echinacea heads, growing the supply of achenes that are ready to be scanned, so that we can keep the samples moving through the steps. I also spent considerable time on randomizing. I resorted the informative and uninformative achenes from some of the 2013 and 2014 collection so that they are organized in the same way as more recent samples and so protocol is consistent across the board. After resorting was complete, I did the standard randomization protocol on achenes from 2018. In addition to working with the Echinacea collection, I continued to organized the native bee collection. One task in particular has been going through the specimens, checking the SPID numbers, and checking them off on a data sheet to confirm which specimens still exist in the collection and which ones have been removed or discarded. I have labeled each smaller box within the cases with Roman numerals and have recorded on the data sheet in which box each specimen can be found. I will continue this project in the last few days of my internship and hopefully complete it so that there is a definite record of the specimens in the native bee collection. Breaking news from Team Echinacea East, back here in Wooster, Ohio! Upon returning to the lab this morning, the team was ready to begin work again after our trip to Minnesota. However, we were not prepared for the tragic scene that greeted us when we arrived. The Great Waluigi Wall of Williams Hall, constructed earlier this summer (a remembrance to our lab mate Mia while she was away in Arizona back in June), had vanished without a trace!   After taking a moment to grieve and process this traumatic event, the team regrouped to further assess the situation and get to the bottom of this heinous crime. We discovered that while The Great Waluigi Wall was gone, not all the Waluigis of the lab had disappeared. The five Waluigis spread throughout the lab appear to have been left unharmed, much to the team’s relief. But despite the team’s best and most valiant search efforts, the other Waluigis could not be located.  As to the suspect of the crime, the team thought long and hard about who could possibly be motivated to such a terrible act. Here, we arrived at a heart-breaking conclusion. The only person who had been in the lab during our time in Minnesota and thus the only person with direct access to the Waluigis would have been Mia herself! However, while still lacking the evidence, this awful possibility cannot be confirmed for certain at present. Team members reached out to Mia for a comment on the situation but received no response. It even appears that our suspect has gone so far as to flee to Arizona, forcing the team members to consider this frightening possibility.  In the meantime, if anyone has any information as to the location of the Waluigis, please contact Ren, Miyauna, or me at Team Echinacea East. A memorial service for The Great Waluigi Wall will be held on 26 July 2019 at 4:00PM (EST) in Ruth Williams Hall. Hello flog! Today’s flog is a bittersweet one, as it marks Team Echinacea East’s last update from here in Minnesota. After what has been a wonderful field experience with some truly amazing people, Miyauna, Ren, and I begin our journey home to the great state of Ohio tomorrow. Though we are sad to be leaving, we have had some great times while we’ve been out here, including times from our last day of field work! We started the day off by making the drive out to P2 to tackle some more measuring and make some more progress on the pulse/steady experiment. Though we had been making steady progress through the measuring, the team really surged ahead today, and now are over halfway done!  After wrapping up with the morning tasks, the team trekked back to Hjelm House for lunch, where we were joined with a few special guests – Stuart’s parents and Steve Ellis (a local beekeeper) and his wife, Karen. Steve gave a talk about his experience raising honeybees, how his bees have been affected by neonicotinoids, and his experiences going up against the state and federal governments to get them to restrict/ban the use of these harmful chemicals. Though we usually focus on our own native solitary bees here at the Echinacea Project, I think we all found it well worthwhile to take this short break to discuss the nonnative honeybee and the plight of pollinators all across the world.  After the conclusion of Steve’s talk and a brief flossing tutorial by Ren, the team prepped to head back out for the afternoon. This mostly included people working on their independent projects – Julie checking her crossed plants, Jay killing some more ash, and Riley and Erin honing their computer wizardry skills a bit more. Miyauna, Ren, Amy, and I were in for a special treat though, as we got to ride with John in the famous Bombus Mobile to go water the baby plants in John’s restoration plots at the school.  And that was it! Our final day of field work concluded. It’s been a terrific two and a half weeks, and we wish the team all the luck in the world with the rest of their field season – we will miss you all!  Avery Hello flog! After returning from our long day of grit-cultivation in the wet prairie for the orchid-hunting excursion, the team started back with a hard day’s work here in Kensington. The morning included phenology for several different plots, including P2. As the plants progress through the process of flowering, some of them are already beginning to approach end flowering, or have even finished flowering completely! It’s crazy to see how fast they progress!  After a lunch break, the afternoon included a contingent who trekked out to P8 to (finally) finish up measuring for the plot. Despite the grueling conditions of 90+ degree heat, the team pushed through to finally finish off the last few sections, which made for a satisfying end to the day.  That’s all for now! Avery |
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