Purple Loosestrife update

Remember when we started our pots of purple loosestrife for the beetle rearing project? On March 20, they looked something like this:

Click image to enlarge

Not too exciting, are they? Some dirt, some dead sticks, and a little bit of fertilizer.

Well, with a little bit of time and some careful monitoring, the plants took off! Now, a month and a half later on May 2, our plants look like this:

Click image to enlarge

We have a number of shoots that are already about a foot tall, and as you can see they all look very healthy. Taking almost daily growth measurements of these plants really shows how fast purple loosestrife can grow! They grow more slowly when it's chilly and raining, but a couple weeks ago when it was warm, some plants grew from 3 inches tall to almost 8 inches in just  four days! Can you image if you were able to grow an inch a day?

Click images to enlarge

As soon as the shoots grow to be a foot tall, we start pinching off the apical meritstem, which is the area of cells at the very top of the shoots. The apical meristem is what causes the plants to grow taller, but we want them to be as bushy as possible to feed our beetles. By pinching off the top bud, we force the plants to grow more leaves along its stem.   The same thing happens to your shrubs or bushes at home! That's part of the reason why we prune them.  If no one pruned their rose bushes, the rose stems would grow very long, there wouldn't be as many leaves, and you wouldn't get as many flowers.

Speaking of the beetles, over-wintered adults have emerged! We found some in the wetlands on Monday, munching away on purple loosestrife leaves. Now we just have to wait until our potted loosestrife plants are tall enough, and then we can start collecting the beetles!

Galerucella Beetle Rearing Facility - Just in time for spring!

Happy spring equinox! Over the past few days, Amber at Great Meadows National Wildlife Refuge and Katrina, a Student Conservation Association fellow working with the Refuge and the National Park Service, set up our Galerucella beetle rearing facility.  The pools are housed at the Assabet River National Wildlife Refuge visitor center.

Creating the beetle rearing facility is a multi-step process. First, we must go find existing purple loosestrife plants in the wild that are large enough to survive being transplanted. After those plants are dug up, they are brought back to the facility location.

After we have all of the root balls back to the facility site, we have to wash them to remove all soil, debris, and roots from other plants. We do this because we want to grow the purple loosestrife and raise the beetles in as controlled an environment as possible.

We plant the loosestrife roots balls in large pots within children's wading pools. We will fill the pools part way with water to simulate the loosestrife's natural wetland environment.

Even though purple loosestrife is an invasive species, we want our samples to grow well while they are in the pots. To encourage their growth, we add fertilizer to each pot.

After all of our plants are potted, this is what they look like! It may not look like much, but over the next several weeks the plants should sprout and grow leaves. We will carefully monitor their progress and growing conditions, trying to make them feel right at home!  By May, our cultivated loosestrife plants should be large enough to feed our beetles.

(click image to view it larger)

Muskrats are just one of the many animals who call the rivers home - they are rodents who must always live near water, just like beavers! Above is a muskrat house, called a lodge, on the Sudbury River between Sudbury and Wayland.  Muskrat lodges look very similar to beaver lodges, but they are usually smaller and made out of small brush and aquatic plants like cattails instead of the sticks and logs we usually see in beaver lodges.   Keep an eye out if you're walking along the river banks too - muskrats also dig burrows!

Spring is in the air!

(click image to view it larger)

We may still have a week and a half until spring officially starts, but with our mild winter it seems like it's already in full swing. You've probably noticed that a lot of grass was able to stay green throughout the season, but new growth is starting to wiggle its way up through the turf as well.

Here at Great Meadows in Sudbury, the mosses are getting a jump on things and sending up their sporophytes. Unlike most plants you may be used to, moss produce spores instead of seeds. The spores are contained in the sporophytes, and will fall off to be dispersed by the wind when they are ready.

Mosses also don't have vascular tissue like a lot of plants and trees. That means they don't have tube-like structures in their stems that bring water to all parts of the plant. Without those tubes, mosses have to get their water by letting it absorb from one cell to the next. That is why mosses are low-growing, and you will always find them in wet areas!