[Siskiyou Sam]

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.

[resin_lung]

Originally Posted by Siskiyou Sam

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.

[who dat is]

What are you going for here? Looks like you're getting fungal growth on the wet pollen now?

[Siskiyou Sam]

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.

[zif]

Cool project!

Aside from firing up your SEM, do you (or does anyone) have a good idea of how to prove this:

Originally Posted by Siskiyou Sam

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]

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]

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.

[Siskiyou Sam]

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.

[Siskiyou Sam]

Originally Posted by packerfan79

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]

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.

You do you though