No rain? Back to field work!

What?  No rain?  Well, soggy or not, there's field work to be done.  A hard thing to figure out is the life history of some plants. Out on the prairie one of our target species is a lousewort, a green parasite, and it's been tough trying to figure out how it grows and when it dies.  So a couple of years back a whole batch (sciency term) of largish (more jargon) plants were marked and measured in various ways with the idea of coming back the next year to see how they had changed.  How many seedlings were around?  How many shoots with how many leaves did it have now?  Did it produce any plantlets via short rhizomes?  Then nature intervened and over the next winter, one with plenty of snow cover, the marked plants, clearly showing a superior delectability had been almost completely eaten by some small mammalian prairie resident.  You understand that all that before data, and the time invested in getting it, was essentially useless without the after data.  But you try again.  This year, a small 10 cm x 10 cm plots with lousewort seedlings were marked.  And the seedlings are being counted and individually identified photographically.  You expect the seedling stage to have a high mortality, but is it higher when the seedling must find a host to survive?  Well, you place your bets and then spend your time and money to find out.  Here's one of the 100 square centimeter plots (3 orange nails, 1 grey nail for orientation at the corners).  The lousewort is easy to identify from the time it's first pair of true leaves appear by the scalloped margins.  So, what you think?  How many seedling do we have here?  How many will survive?  And how long before they get big enough to reproduce? 

Field work looms

Our field research season begins as soon as the first shoots appear.  So now a lot of planning has to be done to get all of our ducks in a row so you do the right things in the right order in our usual near futile attempt to wrest some meaningful data from the bosom of Mother Nature.  One difficult problem is that some events are so ephemeral that you don't have long to study them.  Here's an interesting one.  Shoots of the lousewort emerge (soon!) on our prairie with a dark purple color, anthocyanin, but a certain small percentage, roughly about 20 percent, are green with no hint of purple color.  By the time the plants reach flowering season in just a few weeks, the weather has warmed and the purple color faded such that the two forms cannot be distinguished.  Past measurements also show that on cold sunny days, the purple rosettes are a few degrees warmer than the green rosettes.  Does this translate into any resource or reproductive advantage?  This is hard to determine, but that's what we're working on.  And we're also interested to figure out the genetics of these color morphs.  Maybe the green morph is inherited as a recessive gene?  So some reciprocal pollinations will be made.  Hopefully the prairie will be burned before we start doing our field work, and not while we are doing field work!   
Sorry if you saw this blog before.  Apparently using the less than symbol makes the program think everything after it is some sort of html statement and it goes goofy.  What a surprise!

Field work commences

Although a stack of exams awaits, field work begins this afternoon.  The prolonged early warmth of spring 2012 has moved up our field work schedule by at least 3 weeks.  And you cannot just decide to wait until later.  In this sense field work domineers your life; your needs and wants are subordinated to those of your research organism.  The prairie lousewort is one of the 1st plants up on the prairie, seen here emerging after a burn, next to a partially melted marker, inflorescence already formed and ready to go.  Fortunately some young backs have decided to get involved in our research, and their assistance will be most welcome.  When studying rain forest trees, one of my student field assistants was afraid of heights and would not climb a ladder.  With prairie field work operating down at ground level one of the students is a pole vaulter!  As usual our first act is to find all of our research plots, and although marked by a permanent metal tag and corner spikes, and although mapped, it's amazing how tough it is to find some of them even after a vegetation clearing burn.  In full vegetation finding the plots is next to impossible.  Every now and then something pulls a tag out making things really difficult.  However, only one plot has been totally lost, misplaced if you will, since 2006, and fortunately it was a second control so we can operate without it.  In particular my collaborator has lost many pens and several pairs of sunglasses, and some of them do get found.  Last year this was quite an experience because several large Nerodia (water snakes) were emerging from dens and sunning themselves, and giving my snake nervous colleague quite a bad startle.  This will not be brought up, as bad field episodes are best forgotten.