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.
A precision line of flags made by the team (photo creds to Emma)
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.
Darwin practicing his road safety with his hi-vis hat (Photo creds to Erin)
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.
The Near Town Hall plant (photo creds to Erin)
We will keep cleaning so that we can have the most accurate and efficient season possible!
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.
We thought we’d seen the last of each other when we split up at TSA, and then coincidentally reunited while contemplating whether or not to buy airport mac and cheese (verdict: not.)
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!
The scene of the crime!!The original Great Waluigi Wall, in all its glory
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.
Some of the Waluigis spread throughout the lab, including this one on Martha Chase, have been spared.
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.
Ren investigates the lab for any traces of the missing Waluigis
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.
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!
All smiles for P2 measuring!!
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.
We love bees! (and Stuart’s world-famous cake!)
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.
Bombus Mobile selfies!
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!
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!
Almost done flowering!
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.
Shea and John, powering through the last few sections of P8!
We started today by searching for flowering plants in Experimental Plot 2. The plants in the approach are really getting tall, and lagging on the walk in can mean losing the person in front of you!
Shea and Julie battle their way through the grass on the approach to P2
Today I received a crash course in phenology. As heads begin flowering they progress through a number of stages that we record. Being able to distinguish between them is important to understand whether flowering has begun, or if we need to check back soon to record the start. Here are the four stages we saw today!
We record”rays up” after they’ve grown at least one centimeter!
We all paired up to search the rows, which eventually resulted in Riley and I facing down our advancing teammates as we tried to thread the needle between the other pairs. We have to be careful about where we step in the plots so we avoid trampling plants.
Our view of Shea, Jay, Julie and Drake as we tried to search the middle row; we needed to stand where Jay and Julie are!
In addition to plenty of plants we saw a menagerie of creatures in P2. My caterpillar adventures continue, and I am continually impressed by how many frogs live in the prairie! Back home in the swamp frogs are never a surprise, but here big leaps from little guys in the middle of the plot still startle me.
Leopard frog making a great escape from Drake’s handA mystery slimy guyA mystery fuzzy boy
This afternoon we were visited by Tracie, Josh and Ruth, and over the phone Julie, Amy and I chatted with Lea about methods we could use this season. It was exciting to have new faces and voices around the Hjelm House! We spent the sunny afternoon sweating and rechecking flowering plant locations in P1, and weather providing we should be able to finish up P2 tomorrow.
