New paper out in Plant Ecology

The team and the labeling tent, March 2020

Pulse-chase carbon labeling in tropical acacias

Gabby Mizell, a PhD candidate in the lab, has led a new paper from our group showing that it is possible to label ant-acacias in field settings in Kenya, and to track carbon from the tree to its ant mutualists. This paper was a tricky one: we started out with an ambitious plan to label four trees in each of four experimental treatments, but, two weeks into our experiment, we were all told to return home to Nevada immediately because of the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Nevertheless Gabby and the team persevered, showing (with our limited set of four labeled trees and four controls) that labeling the trees in this environment was possible(!) and could lead to interesting insights into tree carbon-allocation priorities in the context of their complex biotic environments.

Spoiler alert: Gabby was finally able to return to Kenya and repeat this experiment in its entirety (N = 32) in 2022, so we’ll be able to learn even more from her experiments in the near future.

In the meantime, please check out the paper showing that it’s all possible!