Brown spot on fiber of goldenrod seed parasail

[rjlittlefield]

Last night I posted some shots of goldenrod seed over in the macro forum.

MacroLuv asked about some small brown spots visible in one of the shots, so I took an even closer look.

40X NA 0.65 objective, 10X eyepiece, Canon PowerShot SD 700 IS at minimum and maximum zoom, plus some cropping.
Image of stage micrometer overlaid in Photoshop.


Pollen, you think? The appearance seems right, but the size seems a bit small (5-7 microns diameter -- this is a big one).

--Rik

[Edited from initial post -- photo elements re-arranged to match the macro images better.]

[Ken Ramos]

Unless there are quite a number of them, could be a wayard spore from something else. 5 to 7 um is pretty small for a grain of pollen but then again you got to consider the size of the flower I suppose.

[MacroLuv]

Very impressive, Rik.
It even shows some structure, kind of radial stripes.
Two others, I saw at second look, are about half smaller.

[MacroLuv]

Something forced me to look back on this picture... if it is a living creature... I could swear I saw it releasing cluster of eggs.