Pollen Sample of White Flowers from Avery Courtyard in Pasadena, CA

May 09, 2019 • 10:10 PM UTC

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eshao18

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A Foldscope image of a pollen sample from a white, five-petaled flower (potentially Dodecatheon meadia ) taken from Avery House in Pasadena, CA at 4:50 PM PST on 5/9/2019. The pollen was collected in two steps. First, I took the flower and gently tapped it against the glass slide to get some pollen on the slide. However, the conditions were slightly wet, so I took the end of a clean chopstick and gathered some pollen from the stamen of the flower and smeared it onto the glass slide. Finally, I placed a drop of water onto the slide and used its adhesive properties to put the coverslip in place.

The flower from which the sample came from. The magnification of the foldscope is 140x, and the diameter of the field of vision is 400 microns (5.5cm/140), so we calculate that the size of the pollen grains range from 10 microns to 30 microns in diameter. The bottom grain of the three large pollen grains in the first quadrant of the image would be 20 microns in diameter.

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