Super Wheat!

Last Thursday was our first "Born to Do Science" event at the library, and it went very well! Many thanks to Sue Busch for setting up the series with the library, to our guest scientist, Cheryl Baker, and to Lisa for taking all these great photos!

By the way, there is no photo of me performing because... Cheryl put together a slide show to go with my song, so we just played it on the projector. Stay tuned; you're going to get to see it too, soon!

Here's what the room looks like. A lot of people came in late, due to traffic from the football game (who knew?), so we ended up with a somewhat bigger crowd than you see here.

Cheryl was awesome - she brought vials of wheat for every kid to observe (and taste!), plus several kinds of live aphids and magnifying glasses to view them with!

My neighbor from down the street just happened to be growing wheat in his back yard (he's in the entomology / plant pathology department at OSU) - and he sent a bucket of it for us to look at. Here we're examining some insect damage.

Checking out the live Aphids that Cheryl brought! Can you tell the different species apart?

Amazing Lisa took this photo through a magnifying glass. The green oval shapes are aphids. The little ones are babies. They are born live, and come out as miniature copies (clones) of their mamas.

Here's Cheryl, explaining...

Cheryl also brought these little sprigs of wheat to show the difference between the resistant variety and the vulnerable variety, when infested with Russian wheat aphids. The ones in the photos look pretty healthy, but the non-resistant wheat was obviously not happy at all.

Don't forget, our next event is December 17, at the Stillwater Public Library at 6:00 PM. I hope to see you there!!