May 1: Graduate student Justin Scholten is heading to Japan for 3 weeks to collect Arisaema species and investigate the possibility of homoploid hybrid speciation among three sympatric species: Arisaema serratum, A. tosaense, and A. ehimense. With him are field assistants and undergraduate students at Cornell, Shun Tanaka and Olivia Hullihen. Shun is majoring in Landscape Architecture and Olivia is majoring in Plant Sciences.
May 2-4th: Early success — Team Arisaema has been able to document all three species in the field and has made collections they’ll send back to build genomic libraries for all three species. They are now wandering the hillsides, collecting population-level sampling for landscape genetic analyses.
May 5th-7th: Population sampling in the Senbon Pass — leaf samples and ecological measurements are collected across populations to better understand what’s driving reproductive isolation between sympatric species.
May 8th-9th: The search continues on Mount Saragamine. New populations were sampled and two additional species (A. iyoanum and A. ternatipartitum: pictured below) were also found nestled in the diverse highland habitats.
May 10th: A road trip to Honaicho Isaki ended in a successful hunt for the red-appendix form of A. ehimense at the type locality described in 1989. A sixth species (A. ringens) was found growing along the coast with leaves nearly a meter in diameter.
May 12th-13th: Hunting for Arisaema on Mount Ishizuchi, the tallest mountain on Shikoku Island. Populations of target species were sampled at varying altitudes. One species, A. ishizuchiense (pictured) was found occurring at as high as 1700m (5600ft) near the summit.
May 14th: The quest to uncover drivers of reproductive isolation continues in Kumakogen. An electronic aspirator connected to a trapping chamber efficiently and precisely collects insect species visiting the inflorescences of target species for downstream analyses.
