Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too. And guess who's lurking around with chains of doom rattling from him. That's Dave. He's here in spirit, is what I'm trying to say. And that makes this Short Stuff the chew edition. Hold on the edition.
That's me man. As you know, I've been dealing with this for two plus months. Allergies that never used to get me are getting me now. My doctor said sometimes that happens.
Yeah, you grew into him. That's fantastic.
It's great. We did a very robust episode on pollen back in the day that was really popular because there are so many allergy sufferers in the world and I guess that listen to our show. But we want to think how stuff works. And a PhD here Carrie Whitney for this article. But we're not talking about just pollen. We're talking about you. Hear pollen count all the time and I never stopped to think, is someone counting polland like, how did they even get that number?
The answer is absolutely yes. In that nuts it surprised me. We'll get to that, but just a little brush up on Paul and pollen is the gametophyte, the sperm essentially of the plant. It comes from the anthers, which is the male part, and then it fertilizes the carpul the female part. And pollen. I mean, especially you, Chuck. I'm sure you see it everywhere because it's affecting you. You want to get away from it. Whole drifts of it
just coat the cars in Georgia. Like seriously, everybody, if you have never really experienced pallend, come to Georgia in the early to mid spring, and you will be like, what is going on? And why do people live here?
It coats everything in these huge drifts. So you would think that you could see pollen, but it turns out an individual grain of pollend is in every case microscopic, from ten micrometers to one hundred micrometers, very very small still, but they clump together, which is what produces those visible drifts of pollen.
Yeah, and you know the other thing that pallen does here, and this is the really annoying thing. Like it's annoying if you have allergies, obviously, but it will if you don't like take care of your car or your deck or whatever, like it will bake into whatever it's on.
Yeah, definitely. Don't you have some pressure washing to do?
Well, I've been doing pressure washing, but I have to pressure wash. Like I don't drive my pickup truck. It's like a work truck. I don't drive it that much, so it sort of sits unused for you know, weeks and sometimes a month at a time. And this thing every single year is just has caked on, baked on pollen that you can't wash off. You have to get a pressure washer on it.
Plus that huge accumulation of pine straw that falls in between the hood and the windshield where the windshield wipers are, you just get stuck. Let's just talk about this for a.
While, all right. So pollen gets places in a couple of ways, as everybody knows, it can either go by way of insect or the stuff that's really bad for your allergies is the stuff that goes by the way of wind, right, and it gets airborne. And this is the stuff that they're measuring. They're not going out and sampling a bunch of bees and counting up the pollen drains on their cute little furry, fuzzy legs. They're trying to get to what's in the air, because that's the pollen count that counts.
Yeah, exactly. And usually it's from less showy plants because they don't need to attract bees or birds or whatever. It's like grasses, trees, just you know, stuff that goes kind of unsung weeds, but they blow through the air and that's where it gets into your mucous membranes and makes you sneeze a lot. And one of the things that you have to know how to do if you're counting pollen is to know what each different type of pollen.
Looks like.
Grain. That's what I was after, Yeah.
Looks like yeah. So because when you watch the news, they'll say, like, pollen count is I And if they really know what they're doing, they'll say, you know, look out today for ragweed or something like that exactly.
And I say, we take a little break and we'll get into just precisely how they do that right after this.
Let's do it. Well, now we're on the road driving in your truck. I want to learn a thing or two from Josh.
Chuck.
It's stuff you should know.
Should all right, okay, Chuck, So we were talking about people actually counting pollen, and that pollen grains are microscopic, but that they all have kind of a different morphology, a different shape, and if you put all those things together you get pollen count.
That's right. Specifically, a pollen count is the number of pollen grains and a cubic meter of air over one day, over a twenty four hour period. And I guess carry got in touch with someone when this article was written from Atlanta, because because one Katie Walls was interviewed a meteorologist and I believe she was certified from the Atlanta Allergy and Asthma. Well, I was gonna say association. It seems like an association, but that's it from Atlanta Allergy
and Asthma to be able to do this. And as we'll see, there are other ways you can get accredited through the National Allergy Bureau or the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology to be like as certified. Hey, they know what they're doing, pollen counter.
So what Katie Walls, the meteorologist explained is that in that cubic meter of air that they're sampling over a twenty four hour period, they're actually like attracting pollen in a number of different ways. There's a couple of different instruments that you can use, and each one is called the volumetric air sampling instrument. So there's a known measure of air. Again, a cubic meter of air is typically what's sampled, and again it's usually over twenty four hours.
And there's two types, like I was saying, one's a rotating arm impactor, and the second is a hearst type spore trap, and they both are exactly what they sound like.
Yeah, we have some brand names here. We're happy to buzzmarket the rotating arm sampler. I'm sorry, impactor. It seems like the most common one is the rotor rode, and then of the hearst variety of the burchard sampler. Sure, and I look both these up, as I'm sure you did. But if you look at a picture, the rotor ride looks like like just a little spinny contraption on a big tripod. The burchard looks to me like a little
bit like a camp stove or something. And they operate, or at least the first one, the rotor ride, is fairly intuitive. It does rotate, it starts spinning around really fast, about twenty four hundred revolutions per minute, and these two little grease rods drop down and they literally just capture pollen. Those little grease rods pick up these pollen spores, and then those rods are placed in a microscope adapter and then they look at those and they get their pollen count.
Right, that's one way. The other way, the hearst type that the Burchard is an example of. It actually sucks in air over twenty four hours, and in that air, it sucks in all the particles too. And rather than a greased rod, they have a greased microscope slide, and so that the pollen and the spores are attracted to
that microscope slide. And then what's neat is the slide moves inward at a specific rate two millimeters an hour, so you can actually see hour by hour which paullen was highest at what time, And like you said, in exactly the same way, they put it under a microscope and they study it. And the people that study it are called actual palinologists. Palanologist studies pollen and actual palinologist
studies live pollen. They're the ones who actually do the pollen count, and they actually count the pollen spores in their sample.
Yeah. So if you, like me, thought that a pollen count was just some like random sample or like a statistical analysis of what it's usually like, or just somebody making up a number, none of that is true. It is an actual count. Depending on where you are and what resources you have, it's going to work a little differently. Sometimes they collect this stuff every day for a year. Sometimes they just do it on weekdays. Sometimes it's a couple of days a week. Sometimes sometimes it's the county
health department doing it. Sometimes it's an allergist that maybe is contracted by the news station. So it really depends on where you are and probably like how big of a city and maybe how much pollen you have in general as to how this goes down.
Yeah, I could see city government having to be fairly flushed to invest in a Pallen counting station.
You think, how much are they?
I don't know. I think it's more of a show off thing than anything, you know what I mean? Okay, Like you want to show off, you want to show up Shelbyville, so you get your Pallen counting station. Yeah, I gotcha, And then Chuck, we talked about how the volume of air is usually about a cubic meter, right, Yeah, so that's three feet by three feet by three feet roughly, and if you just kind of make that shape around yourself,
it's not that big. And what they're saying is, if there's like a like we're at three thousand level, which is extremely high, there are three thousand grains of pallen in that cubic meter over the course of twenty four hours or at any given point in that twenty four hours, which means that you're sucking all that in. So it really kind of drives home like what those numbers mean. I mean, yeah, three thousand sounds way higher than say
two hundred or fifty or whatever. But when you put it in that perspective, it's almost it almost makes you choke.
Yeah. I wonder if any place places these in different places to compare those numbers, probably like a really rich city, like I mean, it would I mean maybe Atlantic city maybe, but it would it would seem to make sense that there's more pollen you know, on the edge of a forest than there would be, you know, in the mall parking lot. Right, sure, you'd think so it's airborne, but I don't know.
No, No, it definitely because it's gonna spread out from that forest, you know, so yeah, it would be denser there.
I wonder where they put these things in.
I don't know, but you're probably you're not getting an accurate count when you put it right at the edge of a forest. But also you're making way more work for yourself too, because you got to count all that, buddy.
That's right, you got to get to that forest. So there's a.
Couple of other things that this House Stuff Works article included about paulin that I found gratifying that they were saying, like, yes, paulind makes you sneeze and it can give you terrible allergies, but it's also useful in other ways. And the actual palinologiststudy live pollen, but there's other kinds of palinologists that study fossilized pollen or they use it for crime fighting.
Yeah, because that could be your alibi if there's pollen on the scene and they say that that you were there, and you're like, that's not my pollen, because my pollen is ragweed and that pollen is some other kind of weed. Yeah, hickory. That could get you out of a murder rap totally.
That's forensic palinology. And then just regular palinologists are the ones that study fossil pollen and you can do everything from figure out what plants ancient societies worked with to what the climate of like an incredibly old spot on Earth was just by finding pollen grades. And the reason why is because when when a plant evolves, it's pollen morphology. It doesn't change even over millions and millions of years.
So if you found a piece of rag, we'd paullen fossilize into you know, a strata that's sixty million years old, you know that there was actually ragweed growing there because it matches the ragweed morphology today.
That's right.
You got anything else?
I've got nothing else, just snotty nose.
Okay, Well, good luck with that, Chuck, And since I wish Chuck good luck. Short Stuff is out.
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