Rationale: After discussing with my group we decided to investigate whether the presence of pesticides affect the presence of arthrobacter phages in the soil of Oak trees. We intend to do this by comparing the soil of similar Oak trees from Cameron Park, which has no pesticides, and the Baylor campus, which has pesticides sprayed regularly.

Procedure:

1. I went to Cameron park and looked for a tree with leaves that resembled that of an Oak

   tree.

2. I took multiple pictures of a tree I suspected to be a White Oak that had died of Oak Wilt.

   I attempted to take a measurement of the circumference of the tree at 137cm but since the tree had split open by so much I took the circumference of the individual portions and found the average.

3. I also took a diameter of the point at which the trunk split and multiplied by pi to get the circumference at that point.
4. I took a photo of the full tree and put a bottle in the shot to use as a measuring tool given that the height of the bottle is 8in.
5. I then gathered soil from the base of the tree about 3 inches deep and put the sample in the refrigerator of my dorm for washing next Monday.

Observations:
The tree seemed to be infected with Oak Wilt as the trunk was split open and the inner side was covered in white and had black spots typical of infected trees.

The circumference of average circumference of the trunk at 137cm was 53.34cm. I could only capture a portion of the tree in my camera, so I know the tree was at least 548.64 cm tall. There were no leaves whatsoever on the tree, which is extremely unusual for this time of year. In addition, the soil beneath the tree was extremely dry and had the texture of powder, despite the extremely high amount of rainfall that we have experienced recently.

Throughout the entire forest I found very few Oak trees that still had their leaves, and there was an abundance of trees that had fallen over and died. The few Oak trees I found were just saplings and even many of them had browning leaves.

Interpretation and Next Steps:
I think there is definitely something to look into here. February through June are usually the most common months for Nitidulid beetle to feed on the sap of trees and transmit the disease, so there might be an outbreak that happened during the summer months. However, all the trees on Baylor’s campus are green and have leaves. Could it be the pesticides? Now that I have the soil sample the next step is to wash the soil and perform assays. From there I should compare my findings to those of my groupmates who took samples from trees on Baylor campus.