Aug 14th, 2017: Pollen

♫ Measles make you bumpy and mumps'll make you lumpy
And chicken pox'll make you jump and twitch
A common cold'll cool you and whooping cough'll fool you
But pollen grains makes everyone their bitch.♪

Pollen is a fine to coarse powder consisting of microgametophytes (=pollen grains), which produce the male gametes (sperm cells) of seed plants. Wind pollinated plants have to make billions of pollen grains if one might succeed – it’s an intimate improbably lottery!
A hard coat covering the pollen grain protects the sperm cells during the process of their movement between the stamens of the flower to the pistil of the next flower. Pollen grain morphology is breathtakingly diverse. Wind pollinating plants generally produce small grains with a smooth surface, thereby increasing the probability of successful fertilization.

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I wonder about the colors. How accurate they are. I haven't paid close enough attention to the pollen on my car based on which tree I park under.

Atchoo!

glatt;993953 wrote:

I wonder about the colors. How accurate they are. I haven't paid close enough attention to the pollen on my car based on which tree I park under.

Probably a false color image. Electron microscopes only image in black and white. There has been some progress in making a natural color EM.
I love how some of them resemble coral reef structures.

Also, fuck pollen.

Wow, Bullitt!

Welcome back friend!

Bullitt;993984 wrote:

Also, fuck pollen.

That.

They can also be colored but single ones are too small for us to see the color as being anything other than scattered daylight (=whiteish)

bullitt ... ... ... {feints}