Stuff You Should Know - How Pollen Works

Episode Date: July 2, 2013

For about 375 million years, plants have been using pollen (aka plant sperm) to propagate their species. And the technique has stuck around because it works. Join Chuck and Josh for a cozy look at the ins and outs of plant reproduction. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from house.works.com Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And that means it's time for Stuff You Should Know. The itchy, screezy, skeezy, scratchy edition. Not skeezy. No. That's not.

The itchy, scratchy, sneezey edition. That's what I meant. There you go. It's funny how you can mix words together and come up with other words you didn't mean to say. Jerry's eyes are itching. Yeah. Well, we should say we're just talking about the pollen count here in Atlanta. That's pretty much all we ever talk about ever.

Sure. When the camera's not on or the mics aren't recording. That and Coca-Cola. Oh, you know how everyone comes to Atlanta and they're like, oh, every street's named Peachtree. Oh, yeah. Let's go drink a Coke. Because those are the only two things we've ever had.

Exactly. All right. Sorry. So you want to talk about pollen some more? Yeah. It's low right now in Atlanta. 39. That's moderate.

Yeah. Well, low for us. Right. But according to the pollen scale, the scale that they used to count pollen and then designate it somewhere along the pollen spectrum, 39 is considered moderate. Not even low. Moderate. When it's really bad here in Georgia, it gets to about 9,000.

Yeah. In the few weeks that the streets run yellow when it rains with yellow water. Yeah. Looks like pee. Yeah. Your car's totally covered in it. You're covered in it. It's just everywhere.

Everywhere. Yeah. But now we're about to tell everybody. We're basically going to turn everybody into a palinologist. Yeah. To an extent. You should be a big fan after this. An amateur palinologist.

I think about a third of all the plants and vegetables and fruits and vegetables we eat are here, thanks to pollen. If you like eating food, it doesn't come in a box. Thank you, pollen. Is it just a third that pollinate or a third that are just angiosperms or gymnosperms? A third that pollinate. Wow. Yeah.

What's up with the other two thirds? I don't know. Well, you know, bananas. They're clones of one another. There you go. There's one. There's the one. I think 1,000 varieties of bananas, and thanks, by the way, to Damn Interesting for this information.

But there's like 1,000 varieties or species of bananas, but each one, like if you eat like a type of just one of those species of bananas, you're eating an exact clone of every other banana in that species because many thousands of years ago, humans just stumbled upon the banana, which is a hybrid of two basically inedible fruits that came together to form the delicious banana, but made them sterile. All banana plants are sterile, and the only way that they're allowed to propagate is by human hand. They're delicious.

I did a Don't Be Dumb about that. Oh, yeah? Yeah. Well, you just did it again. Yeah. You can check out Don't Be Dumbs on our website, StuffYouShouldKnow.com. Wow. All right.

Anyway, pollen. Yes. It's been around for a while. I know in our bee podcast, we talked about how bees and pollen kind of emerged side by side 100 million years ago. Some say it co-evolved. Right. But pollen actually goes further back than that.

Yeah. In this article, it says about 375 million years ago is when the plants started getting clever and spreading their seed literally using pollen. That's right. Different techniques. And I think that the gymnosperms were first. You think so? I believe so.

Yeah. And the author of the article here points out that the reason why it evolved was so plants didn't have to be dumb and rely on water to carry their junk to fertilize other junk. Right. You know? They're like, how about wind? Or how about that bat? Yeah.

Or how about that beetle? Yeah. Or how about that bird pooping it out? That's right. Yeah. And like I said, I think pollen grains or plants spread their seed literally. Plant pollen is what amounts to plant sperm. Yeah.

Like I always go to the kids science pages to research first off. Right. I mean, they're good. They're colorful. Yeah. If we wanted pollination very simply, you know, people reproduce, animals reproduce, they need male and female parts. Plants and flowers are no different.

They need male parts to connect with the female parts to make an egg. And in this case, pollination is how it's done. Right. It's basically how that sperm, the pollen, reaches that egg. Which is the ovule. Yeah. Right. And then another magic happens.

That's right. But let's talk about the way it looks, first of all. Yeah. There's like pretty cool. There's a lot of different looks to pollen depending on the plant. Yeah. And all of these variations, it can be like a cone, literally a pine cone. Yeah.

And look at, you know, just look at microscope pollen on Google images and you'll see all sorts of weird colorful shapes and sizes. Yeah. Some look like blowfish. Yeah. Others look like Sputnik. Really? Yeah.

And you can see the Sputnik. Some have ribbed edges for, and all of these adaptations are, or mutations, I guess they became adaptations, allow that pollen to kind of better ensure that it's going to be carried to where it needs to go. Yeah. It has a purpose. It's not just like, hey, this one would look neat if it looked like a starfish. Exactly.

It serves its purpose. Mix it up. In the end. It's kind of what amounts of basically wings because they're carried on the wind. Oh yeah? Yeah, like dandelion pollen that's carried on the wind. True. Well, dandelion is self-pollinate too.

We'll get to that though. Yeah. They're slippery little guys. Yeah, they are. They're also high in phytonutrients as well. Oh yeah? Dandelion greens are. Oh, the stems?

No, the leaves. Oh, the little leaves. Yeah. The yellow part. So here's the rule of thumb. Here's a New York Times article that came out very recently about phytonutrients and how we basically bred them out of our food. And the rule of thumb is the bitterer or more bitter, the plant, the higher it is in

phytonutrients. Phytonutrients have kind of a bitter astringent taste. And we tend to not really like that. So we stopped eating those things over time and replaced them with sweet things that aren't necessarily good for us, like potatoes and other starches. Yeah, well, bitter things can also kill you. That's probably the reason why. Maybe so.

That's a pretty good point. But bitter stuff that you know won't kill you. Yeah, sure. Dandelion leaves go out and eat some right now. Yeah. But back in the day, I bet people were like, that tastes bad and it killed tuk-tuk, so let's just not eat it. Right, exactly.

Yeah. All right. So should we talk about pollination? Talked a little bit about pollen. Yeah. Should we talk about how plants make little baby plants? Right. And it's pretty simple.

Like I said, the male part, and it really helps to follow along if you go to a handy-dandy little visual aid I found, because they really break down the male parts and the female parts. The female has the pistol, and that's P-I-S-T-I-L. And within that, you have the ovary, which sits down low in the plant, and the style, which is a long, thin appendage, I guess, that contains pollen tubes. Right. And then at the top, you have your stigma, which is going to catch the pollen. Yeah, and that's the female part, right?

That's the lady. Okay. Don't be confused because it is phallic in nature. Yeah, true. But it's still the female part. And the male has the filament, which is a long stem, and then the anther at the top, which holds all the pollen. Yeah.

And that's pretty much the long and short of the parts. And is that just angiosperms that you're describing, or is that all pollinating plants? I think these are just the angiosperms. Well, we should say quite explicitly that there's basically two ways that plants can pollinate. There's gymnospherms and angiosperms. And the big difference between the two is that gymnospherms, literally that means naked seed, which by the way, gymnasium means place to be naked.

Genosium in German. Did you know that? Yeah. So, gymnospherms, naked seed, there's nothing protecting the seed once it's produced. Yeah. And a seed is just a fertilized ovum, or ovule, right? Yeah. Angiosperms produce something to protect that seed, whether it's a shell, like a nut,

or fruit, like an apple, with the seeds inside. Right. Because an apple is just an enlarged ovule, ovary. And the seeds are the fertilized ovum. Yes. And they also pollinate, cross-pollinate or self-pollinate. Right. Those are the other two differences.

So, you were saying what, of dandelions, self-pollinate? Well, they can do both, but they do have a little, a cool little feature. They basically grow up, you know, this is when there's still the little yellow flower. Mm-hmm. They have these little florets that grow up. And if you look, well, you probably can't see. If you look really, really close, though, these little florets that grow up, and as it grows, it carries the pollen on its little stem, and then eventually gets to a point

where it doesn't start growing up anymore, and it splits, and then starts curling back on itself to, you know. No way. It picks up its own pollen from its own style. And it's self-pollination. It's not gross or like perverted. There's a lot of plants out there, though, that have mechanisms to pollinate. To prevent them from self-pollinating.

Yeah, it can be good or bad. That's what I couldn't figure out. Well, the plants somewhere along the way figured out, like, hey, the wider the gene pool, the better off we are, because the more room there is for adaptation, mutations, and then adaptations, right? Yeah, but in here, the author said, ideally, it cross-pollinates, but I don't think that's the case always. It's not ideal.

It's just some doing some don't, right? I mean, if you look at it like from just an animalistic or an organism viewpoint, right? Like with us. If you just get a bunch of Mennonites together and they just reproduce with one another, there's going to be defects that just are propagated throughout this little gene pool. But if the Mennonites spread out into the larger country as a whole, those defects are going to, I guess, be kind of watered down by the size of the gene pool. I think it's the same thing with self-pollinating and cross-pollinating.

Yeah, because it's interesting, because things like peanuts are self-pollinators, and that's why they thrive, but corn has a mechanism to not allow itself to self-pollinate. Like there, I think the sperm is ready at a different time than the ovule is ready to accept it. Correct. So it's a timing thing. The thing is, peanuts would probably be able to talk if they didn't self-pollinate. And they sound like Jimmy Carter.

So there's a lot of mechanisms that plants have to prevent themselves from self-pollinating. Some might have either just male plants and just female plants. Some may be where the male part of the plant has both male and female flowers, for example. The male flower might come out before the female flower on the same plant, so that they're not the timing's off a little bit. And then there's some that are just like, they'll signal a biochemical marker if pollen from the same plant gets near the ovule, it'll just basically turn barren, so it's incapable of fertilizing itself.

Or like corn where the timing's thrown off, so they rely on cross-pollination, which is pretty cool. For food lovers, there's no place on earth like Mississippi where sweet, spicy, and smoky flavors satisfy your spirits. Wherever you wander, plan today at visitmississippi.org slash dining, Mississippi, Wanderers, welcome. The war on drugs impacts everyone, whether or not you take drugs. America's public enemy number one is drug abuse. This podcast is going to show you the truth behind the war on drugs.

They told me that I would be charged for conspiracy to distribute 2,200 pounds of marijuana. Yeah, and they can do that without any drugs on the table. Without any drugs, of course, yes, they can do that, and I'm the prime example of that. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss y'all. The property is guilty. Exactly. And it starts as guilty.

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you get your podcasts. So let's get explicit again here. Gymnospirms. Yes. Acid seed. How does this happen? Like we'll use the example of a pine, a loblolly pine, because it's fun to say, but that's a conifer.

Conifers are ancient. I believe they were the first pollinating plant. Oh, really? Yeah, I think so. Nice. So let's talk about it. Well, the pine cones, they're little male pine cones, little female pine cones. You might not realize that.

You've got quite a show going on in your backyard at certain times of the year. And basically, once you get the two together, you get a male pine cone and a female pine cone together. The male pine cone fertilizes, well, the pollen comes in contact with an ovule and the pollen starts to go to town. It absorbs a bunch of water. Yeah. Well, the female pine comes a little sticky, too, that helps, by the way.

It does. Helps collect the pollen. Right. So the female or the pollen, the male part of the pine cone, germinates and it starts growing what's called a pollen tube, which basically allows this pollen to directly fertilize the ovule. Once that happens, the ovule basically becomes a seed and the seed is released from the pine cone.

They go everywhere. And then they're eaten by birds and pooped out elsewhere or carried along in their trampled by rhinoceros. Sure. Who knows what just got loose from the zoo. But then that seed is carried along. But it's not protected by anything. It's just a seed.

Right. And hence a naked seed, hence gymnasperms. Right. So angiosperms, they have kind of like a similar process, whereas there's a pollen tube that's grown and the male pollen has come in contact with the female pollen and all that. Yeah. And we're talking about flowers in most cases here. With angiosperms, they're the only ones that flower and produce fruit.

Yeah. So when you think about your garden with the honeybee and all, that's angiosperm. Right. And that's a non-naked seed and that's where the fruit comes in or the shell comes in. There's angiosperms have developed a mechanism to protect the seed, to better ensure survival. And if you think about it, to entice the things that transport these seeds to go ahead and do their thing. Yeah.

There's like every flower has some sort of cool shape or scent or color or something that matches with some little insect or bird or bat that's going to be enticed, like the bumblebee in the fox club. They go hand in hand because it fits up there just perfect and it has a little colorful landing strip on the bottom petal to guide the bumblebee in. Yeah. And it's just like nature's, it's just like harmonious. Right.

There's that one orchid that I believe Darwin predicted the existence of a type of humming bird that had a very long curl beak that had co-evolved with it and he was absolutely correct. So cool. Memorized in that movie adaptation. Yeah. That's a great movie. And then...

You can learn a lot from that movie. Yeah. It's a great attention. Yeah. Anything that... What's his name? Charlie Kaufman writes? Yeah.

Well researched. Agreed. The fruit is another thing too. Animals love to eat fruit. Yeah. The fruit is basically once a fruit, piece of fruit drops to the ground, that means those seeds are ready to go, they're ready to become seedlings. But first they need a fox to eat the apple, carry it in its stomach over several meters

or miles or whatever and then poop it out and then you have seeds that are basically just planted. That's amazing. They take purchase and a new tree begins. Where his seed, her insides were a rocky place where his seed could find no purchase. So pollen grains are actually created, I guess we should step back a second and talk about meiosis. That's the cells are dividing and growing, eventually you get a little pollen.

It looks like a little dust spec to our eyeball but it contains the sperm, it's not actually the sperm. Right. It contains the sperm therein. And the pollen is in pollen sacs at the end of the stamen which we talked about and that little two-lobed antler and then eventually it'll find its way to the stigma and travel down to the ovary and in the case of angiosperms there are two sperm that are used, I don't think we said in the case of gymnosperms it's only one of the sperm is used, right?

Yeah, in a pollen sac there's two sperm but you just need one for the angiosperm you need two. One is actually fertilizing the egg and the other is developing into endosperm together alongside in what will eventually be the seed and if you think that sounds gross like the gymnosperm, I'm sorry the endosperm is like a protein basically to keep it all alive. Yeah, it keeps the seedling happy and healthy. So when you're eating corn you're actually eating the endosperm, each corn kernel is actually, you know, it's like that starchy endosperm.

Right. Which the seed loves to eat itself and that's true. So we talked about bees, we talked about birds, foxes, mentioned poop a couple of times. Fox gloves. Yeah, and you were saying that like basically every flowering plant especially has some sort of mechanism to attract at least one kind of bug or animal that's been proven to help pollinate, transport this pollen. And so I mean for the most part we enjoy them like you like the scent of, you know, a good

flower, right? Oh yeah. Sure. But you might not like the devil's tongue. Yeah. Which is a Sumatran plant that apparently reeks so badly, smells like a decomposing flesh basically. Yeah.

Did you see this thing? I've seen it before. Yeah. It's really remarkable. Yeah. It's like two feet tall. It basically flowers or blooms like once every like 10 years or 20 years or something like that, right?

I'm not sure. If it's the same one I'm thinking of, then yeah. But it's stinky. Right. And the reason why it's stinky is because it pollinates with the help of a type of carrion beetle that's attracted to decomposing flesh. Yeah. So the plant attracts this beetle that likes to eat decomposing flesh by putting out the

smell of decomposing flesh. That's so gross. Yeah. It's spectacular. It is. You know? Yeah. And the philodendron is something you might have in your house.

It actually does the same thing, but it doesn't stink always. There's actually a chemical reaction that takes place and heats it up to emit this odor that the beetle is attracted to. Right. Which sounds pretty gross too. Yeah. But it all works. And I would Google that the Sumatran devil's tongue.

It's pretty cool looking. Like the flower itself is two feet. It's not like, oh, what a long stem. Right. It's just this huge flower. It's amazing. It's something like, was it Fox Glove that provided a landing strip for bumblebees? Yeah.

So flowers in general typically have certain types of, like their color will be based on the kind of creature that helps pollinate it, whether it's diurnal, meaning it's awake during the day, or nocturnal, meaning it's awake at night, right? Right. I guess that's in case of bats and stuff like that. Yeah. And then our old friend Nectar is a big lure, and basically Nectar is around, right, just because it tastes delicious and is enticing.

From what I understand. To the pollinators. Yeah. It's basically like a little enticement. Like you said, for like a bee or something or a bird. Yeah. Come get it because it's placed by the stamen. That's right.

Or the way that the anthors are situated, just the way they're placed in the flower, if it gave it an advantage to bump up against that bee, then it's going to be successful in the long run. Yeah. And live out as a species. That is nice stuff. It is pretty good. So, Chuck, we've reached a point where, I mean, ever since we started selectively breeding

plants, domesticated crops. Like, hey, that's pretty. Right. Or, hey, I like this banana. Yeah. Or that's hearty, and it grows in my awful, hot area that I live in. Exactly. Many reasons to do so.

Right. You know, we wanted to keep plants, we wanted to keep the bad stuff out, keep the good ones we wanted in. Yeah. But it never became more crucial until we started genetically modifying crops. Yeah. And now all of a sudden, not only are the corporations saying like, hey, man, you can't cross-pollinate with our stuff or else that's patent infringement.

Yeah. And nearby farmer says, I'm not using your seeds. It's the bees. You can't blame me. Right. And the farmers who don't want GMO stuff in their crops say, hey, man, you need to keep your crops over there because I don't want your GMO crud in here. I have an organic farm.

Exactly. And your junk is blowing by the wind. It's a touchy subject. We should do that as a whole. Oh, yeah. GMOs. I agree. The idea of like patenting genes in general and let alone like crops is, it's really interesting.

But there's been some pretty clever, simple ways of getting around this problem that's posed by pollination of GMO crops with non-GMO crops. Yeah. Well, distance is obviously one thing. Yeah. It's pretty simple. Don't put my farm near your farm. Yeah.

But they have to do all kinds of studies to see how the wind reacts and how, like, how far does that bee fly? Yeah. And they found in certain parts of Africa, bees will go about four miles, three kilometers. Yeah. And that's their range for food. That's, you know, that's a lot. Yeah.

But I mean, just using that kind of thinking thought process though, like, okay, well, this, you know, there's this guy's growing this over here, so I can't grow this here. Right. That will prevent that kind of pollination, though. Yeah. Another thing they can do is sort of like with the corn, they can time their crop rotation to time out. So where they're flowering at different times and not interfering with one another.

Right. And it's a touchy subject, like, from what I understand, there's a lot, a lot more going on than, you know, is preferred by, like, the organic farmers of the world. Sure. And in the GMOs, they can then say that you're infringing just because they cross pollinated to their crop. Right. Even though you didn't buy their seeds or even want their seeds, if a bee carries their

seeds, their crops pollen over to your crops and then you start to develop plants that have the GMO characteristics that's patented according to the corporations you're infringing on their patent. It's very tricky ground there, isn't it? I don't think it's tricky ground. If you ask me, you should not be allowed to have a patent on any living organism. Oh, well, yeah. You know what I mean, though.

That's my opinion. It gets tricky in courts and in studies and in corporations. The courts, though, tend to side on the corporation's side, typically. Yeah. Let's do that one, though, soon. GMOs. Yeah. All right.

So, that's it for pollen. If you're interested in how pollen causes allergies, then you should listen to our How Allergies Work episode. That was pretty good. Yeah, I was going to recommend that. Nice work. Thanks, man. So, if you want to learn more about pollen, in the meantime, you can type that word in

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It starts as guilty. The cops. Are they just, like, looting? Are they just, like, pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call, like, what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid for it. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever

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Yeah. We have a correction. It's been blowing up lately. Oh man, I'm sorry. You know it's crazy, that's the second time I've done that in a podcast. On that same thing? I don't remember what the other podcast was, but I've mentioned it before and we've gotten tons of corrections about it.

And I didn't learn my lesson. Well this guy was really nice about it, so I'm going to read his. And it's an important correction, because anytime you're talking about drugs. So to recap in the PTSD podcast, we've got the two drugs, Beta Blocker, called Propaninol, which helps with PTSD, confused with Propofol, which is what killed Michael Jackson. And so this is from Chris. He's a big fan. He's listened to every episode on his commute in Southern California, which we know stinks.

So he said what we just said about getting the drugs confused. He said, I can see how you guys can mix it up, because the names are very similar, but they're significantly different, obviously. Propaninol is relatively mild and commonly prescribed and very little potential for overdose while Propofol is a very powerful drug with extremely high potential for overdose and rarely administrated outside of strictly monitored medical settings. It is actually a hypnotic agent that must be administered intravenously, as we talked about Michael Jackson's drip, and is often used in conjunction with general anesthetics

like most general anesthetics. This steep dose response curve significantly increases the risk of overdose, where the effective dose is only slightly below a lethal dose. That's kind of scary. Yeah, it really is. I mean, when you're on that, you're right along the border. Yeah. Well, he says Michael Jackson's case is extremely rare, so he was essentially exposing himself

to risks similar to those associated with general anesthetics used during surgery with a high potential for overdose and death on a daily basis for relatively trivial purposes, which were, in this case, insomnia. Yeah, but from what I understand, he had years-long insomnia. This guy was not sleeping at all. They would give him everything first, and then they'd try that last resort. Sometimes it still wouldn't work. Really?

Yeah, he was really in bad shape at the end. Well, he probably had a resistance to certain things like that. So, Chris goes on to say, I'm not certain about the exact amount of risk posed by a propofol administration, but I believe the risk of death is something on the order of tenths of a percent, meaning he would have died according to the statistical model within a couple of years of daily use, like pretty much guaranteed. Right. Frankly, he would have been better off using heroin that whole time in spite of his ironically

strict yet poorly informed anti-drug stance. So, that's from Chris. Thanks, Chris. That was a genuinely awesome email. Yeah, it was good. And I'm sorry, everybody, for getting so wrong. Well, I mean, the names are just confusing. Yeah, but I mean, one's like a blood pressure medicine, the other one's like pretty much

a general anesthetic. I know, but what gets me is that half of the emails were like, well, yeah, they just sound alike, so you goofed it, and half of them were like, those drugs couldn't be any more different. Right. Like, you really thought that, you know, it's just, it's like a verbal typo. Right. Thank you, Chuck.

Thank you for letting me off. So anyway, if you have a correction for us, we really do like to get those. We like to know what we're talking about. Sometimes we get things wrong. Sometimes I get things wrong, but we do want to be corrected in the nicest way possible, because that's usually who gets their letter read, right? Exactly. Yeah.

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