Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Pollen Count

Episode Date: May 24, 2023

If you watch the news and hear the pollen count is high for some particular type of plant then it’s high time you learned how they do that.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hi, I'm David Eagleman. I have a new podcast called Inner Cosmos on iHeart. I'm going to explore the relationship between our brains and our experiences by tackling unusual questions like, can we create new senses for humans? So join me weekly to uncover how your brain steers your behavior, your perception, and your reality. Listen to Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 Achoo Edition. Hold on the

Indition. 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 them. That's fantastic. Oh, 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 listened to our show. But we want to think how stuff works and then 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 pollen? How did they even get that number? The answer is absolutely yes. Isn't that nuts?

It surprised me. We'll get to that. But just a little brush up on pollen. 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 carpal, 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, hold drifts of it, just coat the cars in Georgia. Like seriously, everybody, if you have never really experienced pollen, 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 pollen is in every case microscopic, from 10

micrometers to 100 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 pollen 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 take care of your car or your deck or whatever, 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 weeks and sometimes a month at a time. And this thing every single year 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. You 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 grains on their cute little 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 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. Green, that's what I was after. Yeah, looks like. Yeah, because when you watch the news they'll say like pollen count is high 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'd say we take a little break and we'll get into just precisely how they do that right after this. Let's do it.

Hi, I'm David Eagleman. I have a new podcast called Inner Cosmos on iHeart. I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford University and I've spent my career exploring the three pound universe in our heads. On my new podcast I'm going to explore the relationship between our brains and our experiences by tackling unusual questions so we can better understand our lives and our realities. Like, does time really run in slow motion when you're in a car accident? Or can we create new senses for humans? Or what does dreaming have to do with the rotation of the planet? So join me weekly to uncover how your brain steers your behavior, your perception and your reality. Listen to Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts,

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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 in a cubic meter of air over one day, over a 24-hour period. And I guess Cary got in touch with someone when this article was written from Atlanta 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 a 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 24-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 it was sampled. And again, it's usually over 24 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 buzz market. The rotating arm sampler, I'm sorry, impactor, it seems like the most common one is the rhodorod. And then of the Hearst variety, the Burkhard sampler. And I look both these up, as I'm sure you did. But if you look at a picture, the rhodorod looks like just a little spinny contraption on a big tripod. The Burkhard looks, to me, a little bit like a camp stove or something. And they operate, or at least the first one, the rhodorod is fairly intuitive. It does rotate. It starts spinning around really fast, about 2400 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 Burkhard is an example of, it actually sucks in air over 24 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 pollen 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. Palinologists studies pollen and actual palinologists 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 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 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 a city government having to be fairly flush to invest in a pollen 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 up Shelbyville so you get your pollen counting station. Yeah, I got you. 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 3,000 level, which is extremely high, there are 3,000 grains of pollen in that cubic meter over the course of 24 hours or at any given point in that 24 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, 3,000 sounds way higher than say 200 or 50 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. Like a really rich city. Like, I mean, it would, I mean, maybe like 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. Although it's airborne, but I don't know. No, no, it definitely would because it's going to 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 not getting, 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 of Works article included about pollen that I found gratifying that they were saying like, yes, pollen makes you sneeze and it can give you

terrible allergies, but it's also useful in other ways. And the actual pollenologists, they study live pollen, but there's other kinds of pollenologists that study fossilized pollen, or they use it for crime fighting. Yeah, because that could be your alibi. If there's a pollen on the scene, and they say that you were there, 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 wrap. 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 a plant evolves its pollen morphology, it doesn't change, even over millions and millions of years. So if you found a piece of ragweed pollen fossilized into, you know, a strata that's 60 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. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.