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Sprouting Pollen photo

Added a moist piece paper of inside a small jar of pollen. Pollen being hydrophilic, started to sprout in about 60 hours. Here is photo taken at after 90 hours of exposure to moisture.
 

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resin_lung

I cough up honey oil
Veteran
Added a moist piece paper of inside a small jar of pollen. Pollen being hydrophilic, started to sprout in about 60 hours. Here is photo taken at after 90 hours of exposure to moisture.

Interesting picture. I don't think I've ever seen that before.
 
I'm pretty sure those are pollen tubes, not fungal growth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollen_tube
Hear is a photo taken 6 hr later showing the growth, if you flip between the two of them. What i'm going for here is checking pollen viability? length of viability under moist conditions and speed of growth of the pollen tube. This may inform us as to how long a seed bag needs to stay in place, that and good reason to play around with a camera on a microscope.
 

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zif

Well-known member
Veteran
Cool project!

Aside from firing up your SEM, do you (or does anyone) have a good idea of how to prove this:
I'm pretty sure those are pollen tubes, not fungal growth.

Mycelial networks sure do look like this, and the growth conditions are also overlapping. I'd worry that older samples should increasingly support contaminant growth vs. pollen tube growth, but that they might appear very similar.

Perhaps the timeline is diagnostic?
 

Betterhaff

Active member
Veteran
What power did you take those photos at? To see any detail of individual pollen grains you have to go microscopic, at least medium power, with most pollen. I would think the same would apply to pollen tubes.

Also, when conditions are right the pollen sprouts quickly and tubes grow quite rapidly (minutes to hours not hours to days).
 

packerfan79

Active member
Veteran
I don't understand what the goal is here? Are you trying to make the pollen viable? I thought that wet pollen is not viable. Mabey I am missing something.
 
The photo is at 60x

A specific goal is not always needed to undertake an investigation. :) But now that I think about it, now that I know what sprouted pollen looks like under the microscope, I can check my stored pollen before making seeds.
 
I don't understand what the goal is here? Are you trying to make the pollen viable? I thought that wet pollen is not viable. Mabey I am missing something.

Once pollen gets wet it sprouts and grows a tube very quickly. I just wanted some photos of pollen in the act of sprouting.
 

who dat is

Cave Dweller
Veteran
I don't mean to be captain obvious but pollen doesn't work when it gets wet. That's how you can render it useless. To me what you are "creating" is simply fungus. :2cents:

You do you though :good:
 
I don't mean to be captain obvious but pollen doesn't work when it gets wet. That's how you can render it useless. To me what you are "creating" is simply fungus. :2cents:

You do you though :good:

No, after meeting some scepticism and with further research, I admit I probably have a photo of fungus. A higher magnification may help me to determine if the tube was indeed coming from a grain of pollen.
Found this photo of 6 h-old Arabidopsis pollen tubes, for a clue.
 

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Betterhaff

Active member
Veteran
The scale at the bottom of that picture shows a 200 micron bar. Obviously a microscopic shot. Those pollen grains are probably 15 – 20 microns in size. A micron is 1 thousandth of a millimeter.
 

rexamus616

Well-known member
Veteran
heres a picture of sprouting pollen. (not cannabis though)

picture.php


i can see what OP was getting at, but yeah, looks like 'cobweb mould'. (a fungus.... which can envelop whole buds quite quickly when it gets going)

Also, pollen, when hydrated, germinates in like 20 minutes (if i remember correctly?)
 

kaosisallwesee

New member
You could try using selective agar media to assess the bio burden of your pollen. SAB plates would allow fungal growth, while minimising bacterial growth. Or you could culture some of the growth you already have.
 
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