Pine Pollen

[Ken Ramos]

I thought I would give the pollen thing a try but utilizing the stereo microscope instead of the light microscope. Though there is not a great amount of magnification with the stereo microscope, it can give one a general impression of the pollen grains, though there is still not a lot of detail to be seen in them.






Pine Pollen
Meiji EMZ-13TR stereomicroscope w/Sony DSC-W5
Onboard halogen illumination w/blue diffuser

[rjlittlefield]

OK, pollen! Gosh, I never thought I'd be a trend-setter.

Ken, these are interesting shots. I'm particularly intrigued by that third one, for the overall shape that it reveals. If I'm seeing this correctly, pretty much every grain of pollen is shaped kind of like a puffy cylinder with 1/4 cut out of it. I would have guessed that they'd be roughly spherical, but obviously not. Thanks for posting!

--Rik

[Ken Ramos]

I got a bit more interested Rik and took a look at the pollen through the Axiostar. A bit more detail of the structure is revealed but not much, though these images do give you a better idea as to the shape of the pollen grains.


Pine Pollen
Sony DSC-P200
Auto mode
1/200 sec. @ f/2.8 ISO 100
Zeiss Axiostar Plus, 10X/0.25 CP Achromat
Brightfield, halogen illumination


Pine Pollen
1/40 sec. @ f/2.8 ISO 100
Zeiss Axiostar Plus, 40X/0.65 CP Achromat
Brightfield, halogen illumination


Pine Pollen1/50 sec. @ f/2.8 ISO 100
Zeiss Axiostar Plus, 40X/0.65 CP Achromat
Oblique halogen illumination w/18mm darkfeild stop, slightly off center

This last image I focused mainly on the bladders of the pollen grains, the darker lobes. What exactly their function is I do not know. I did a little light searching on the web to see if I could find out more about them but the only thing referenced in what little I did search, is that they were just a bladder of sorts.

Thanks Rik

[rjlittlefield]

Having both sets of images makes things even more interesting, Ken!

In the high-mag shots, the bladders look dark. But in the low mag shots, the whole grain looks the same yellowish color.

I suppose the difference is in the illumination, front versus back. The bladders must be more opaque than the central part, while having the same surface color.

I'm struck also that in the high mag shots, the bladders seem to be much farther apart (wider angle with respect to the main body) than they do in the low mag shots. Did these things perhaps open up from one day to the next?

--Rik

[Ken Ramos]

Rik asked:

Did these things perhaps open up from one day to the next?

I don't know Rik. They look as though they might as I look back over some of the images to try and compare different pollen grains, one to another. I continued on my search to try and find a bit more about them but all I get is allergy reports concerning pine pollen and other forms of pollen in general. It seems as though there is all sorts of research being done on things such as "mantis shrimp," which are extremely fascinating in my opinion ( Mantis Shrimp on TED ) but little if any research on how pollen interacts in nature, then again it could just be I am looking or searching in the wrong places. Maybe I should be more specific in my searches. By the way I know mantis shrimp are way off topic but I thought you might be interested. However this presentation has stuck in my mind, having watched it last evening and I just used it as an example of how ones passion can lead to research in various and obscure fields sometimes. I wonder if some major corporation or university would give me several million to study pollen over the next ten years or so. Not that I have a passion for pollen but hey, for several million I could develop one

[rjlittlefield]

By the way I know mantis shrimp are way off topic but I thought you might be interested.

Ah, Mr.Ramos, you know me way too well!

Yes, I was very interested in the mantis shrimp lecture. There are a lot of parallels between those shrimps and my old friends, the click beetles (post #1, post #2, post #3).

Both groups use a "power amplifier" consisting of a muscle, a spring, and a catch or "click" mechanism, to store up energy over a relatively long period of time and then release it very quickly. (Fleas do the same thing to jump.)

At one point, the shrimp lady talks about the difficulties of getting a video camera fast enough to capture her shrimp, in light that's low enough to not fry them. She needed 5,000 to 20,000 frames per second!

That sounded eeriely familiar, so I pulled out one of the click beetle papers (from 1972 -- 35 years ago!).

A Fastax WF 17 camera with extension tubes was used to take high speed ciné pictures at up to 3750 f.p.s. on Kodak 4X negative film. This was uprated in development so that an illumination could be used which did not kill the beetles. ... Speeds of 5000-6000 f.p.s. were also used, but due to the small period of time at which the camera was running at these speeds, it proved very difficult to obtain reasonable results. [The beetles...] would often jump either before or after the film was run.

In this case, new technology seems to have made the photographer's job much easier in one respect (timing), while changing it very little in another (maximum frame rate versus allowable light intensity).

The ultimate limit on frame rate versus light intensity and magnification is set simply by the statistics of photon counting. If you look at too small an area, for too short a period of time, there just won't be enough photons to form an image with tolerable signal-to-noise ratio.

I have never actually run the calculations on that, though I've often wondered about it. Now I'm curious -- how close to the limit are these two examples, anyway?

I'm sorry... What was that you said about "off topic"?

--Rik

Reference: The quote is from M.E.G. Evans, "The jump of the click beetle (Coleoptera, Elateridae) -- a preliminary study", J. Zool., Lond. (1972) 167, 319-336.

[Ken Ramos]

That was a very interesting presentation, especially when she got into the photographic problems encountered in capturing the movement of the "smashers." A big pat on the back for the boys across the pond with the BBC. Yes, that did remind me a lot of your past post involving the Click Beetle. It was amazing, the amount of energy that was stored up in the muscle of the shrimp for striking the snail and even more so the vaporizing of the water and the collapse of the bubble immediately after the strike on the piezoelectric crystal producing the second spike of energy being released, that was shown on her chart. Amazing the correlation between totally different species, both using quite similar mechanisms but in totally different ways. Glad that you enjoyed it

Now what were we talking about...pollen I believe Really sounds sort of bland after all of the shrimp stuff.

[Charles Krebs]

Ken, these are similar to some of the fir pollen around here. Before I know what these where I would find them in my pond water samples and just scratch my head trying to figure out what they were.

[Ken Ramos]

Funny you should mention that Charlie, I used to find them also and looked high and low for images of encysted protozoans, because I thought that, that was what they were. It was sometime much, much later that I accidentally ran across an image of pine pollen, thus identifying my mysterious and wrongly presumed encysted little animal

[bernhardinho]

Hi guys

here you find some nice pdf's by Wodehouse on the subject. I kind of liked them.

http://paldat.botanik.univie.ac.at/inde ... e=download


Bernhard

[bernhardinho]

Funny you should mention that Charlie, I used to find them also and looked high and low for images of encysted protozoans, because I thought that, that was what they were. It was sometime much, much later that I accidentally ran across an image of pine pollen, thus identifying my mysterious and wrongly presumed encysted little animal

That's gorgeous, chaps! Sort of twin ciliates,hm?

I think your pollen grains are from Pinus sylvestris:

http://images.google.com/images?q=pinus ... a=N&tab=wi

Pines and firs are pretty closely related. They're all genus Pinus in the family of Pinaceae


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinaceae


Bernhard

[rjlittlefield]

Pines and firs are pretty closely related. They're all genus Pinus in the family of Pinaceae

Close -- they're all Pinaceae, not all Pinus. The "fir" that Charlie speaks about is probably Douglas fir, Pseudotsuga menziesii. It pretty much blankets Washington State at lower elevations. At higher elevations are various "true firs" in genus Abies and "spruces" in genus Picea. Not sure I've ever heard of anything in Pinus getting called "fir", though some other stuff does get called "pine". Ah, names -- you gotta love 'em!

--Rik