In the Field: Conserving Mead's Milkweed

we're here at the Anderson County Prairie Preserve um in Anderson County Kansas um and we're here looking at um essentially investigating populations of me's milked hi I'm uh Christy Edwards I'm the Steven Camila Brower conservation geneticist the Missouri Botanical Garden so me milked is a scus Medi it's a federally threatened species uh meaning it's kind of near the brink of Extinction and uh most of the populations that are present these days are found in Missouri and Kansas they're actually very pretty so um you know when you look at the flowers they're kind of this big puff ball of flowers that are hanging upside down and they actually smell really good too but they're also just kind of a you know present and really nice prairies as well so they're Specialists to Remnant prairies so high quality Remnant prairies and so um it kind of gets me out into these beautiful Prairie habitats yeah we spent like days here last year tagging all of these so my name is Jordan Hathaway um I work in uh Christy Edwards lab I just started at the Garden about 4 months ago and this is my first field season working on on this uh Meats milked project at all of our sites we are setting up uh camera traps and we're training them on some of the flowering Meads milked stems we are at moer on May 29th 2024 this is T number 988 and it's currently 9:50 a.m. and the idea with the cameras is that we get an idea of um how frequently they're being visited by pollinators what types of pollinators are visiting them and the behaviors that they're exhibiting when they do visit so we have some populations that are very large and have lots and lots of fruits that are produced and we have some small populations and they produce zero fruits maybe one um and the idea is is that we have this large population that we're in here and we're we're using it as a reference to compare all the other sites too and trying to tie that back into potential reasons why the reproductive um success of this species is so low this is 22 34 2234 Tall Grass Prairie habitat occurred you know throughout a lot of the central Midwestern United States and now there's only estimates are between 1 and 4% remaining um so it's a really threatened habitat and that's actually the whole reason why Mees milked is endangered is because of habitat loss so we have a total of 14 sites included in our study um and essentially what we're doing is we're looking at reproductive success um and pollination biology and looking at the relationship between those two that's it is I just I just need data um we need data to answer these questions and so it's I'm greedy about data we're also um netting uh we're forming transects and then netting pollinators around the area where the flowering uh milkweed stems are a transect is essentially just a a way to um essentially set up a grid uh that you sample within and um it's basically a way to subsample a population so you're not essentially trying to sample the entire Prairie um because obviously we just can't do that these prairies are relatively large so and that gives us an idea of sort of the um total pollinator assemblage that is present at any given site and then we can see if there's differences between the pollinators that are present in the area and the ones that are actually visiting the milked and then we're also doing um what's called pollin removal so in means milked the pollen are packaged into these sacks called pollinaria they don't have your kind of standard you know powdery pollen grains um they have these large pollinaria that have to be removed and then deposited into another milked uh we can look to see um essentially the number of pollinaria that had been removed um which kind of gives an estimate of like the male reproductive Fitness of the flowers this one has 11 five 4 5 3 4 5 five five five five five oh okay what we're doing this year for the study um will kind of give us an idea of whether or not the reproductive Fitness of this species is being limited by you know pollinator visitation rate um or the the types of pollinators that are visiting um or if it might be something different such as like a soil nutrient issue next year we'll be looking at whether pollen is limited so maybe the pollinators aren't getting the pollen where it needs to go and then um in the future I'd like to look at whether the timing of different individuals and populations is such that they can't possibly pollinate each other um as well as potentially um maybe an additional study to look at why there's populations that have a lot of individuals that don't flower um so potentially there could be resource uh variation among the populations um and we'd also like to look at how management affects reproductive uh Fitness in this PO this species as well cuz that's kind of the ultimate goal is to try to get this species kind of off the brink of Extinction and into a situation where we have large healthy populations you know we're really interested in working with land owners that have Meads milked so if if uh you know you have Meads milked on your land we're happy to work with you well I mean if you own a prairie uh don't till it you know and like uh really just public support for kind of the continued conservation and management of Tall Grass Prairie habitat is really important you know supporting in any place that um has the Tall Grass Prairie is a really important step