The folks here at Eastfield College who keep our campus beautiful have given us a real Spring treat. They planted thousands of tulip bulbs which are coming into full bloom. (There are also lots of white daffodils.) I want to make sure everyone at the college knows where they are so they have a chance to see them. See the campus map below, but don't wait - they won't last for long.
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| Red arrows indicate location of bulb beds. |
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I went out to take some pictures, but also to bring a flower back to the lab for imaging. Once I saw them I just couldn't bring myself to pick a flower, so instead I reached in and removed a single anther - the pollen-producing structure of the flower.
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| The anther of a tulip. At first glance they appear black, but on the dissecting microscope you can see the multicolored pollen grains. |
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| Here is a close-up of the pollen of the tulip. |
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Now lets look at pollen using the scanning electron microscope.
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| This is a cross-section of the anther. It is a little flattened by the cut with a razor blade, but you can clearly see the pollen grains on its surface. [25x] |
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| This is a closer look at the center of the structure shown in the image above. I don't know what the sac-like structures in the image are, but their shape was too interesting to not show. [200x] |
These are some pollen grains from the tulip. The are pretty crushed down from the high vacuum of the microscope. Note the texture on the surface of the pollen grain. [370x] |
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| This pollen grain is the target for the next image. It is about 75 microns long. That is 75/1,000,000ths of a meter. [800x] |
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| A close-up of the surface of a single tulip pollen grain magnified 15,000 times. To give you some sense of scale, an E. coli bacterium is about 3 microns long. The scale bar in this image is 2 microns. |
Living in Texas, and getting a bit older, I really don't like the cold so it is really nice to see flowers in bloom. If you work at Eastfield, you have my permission to take a short break an head outside to see the show. Happy Spring!
All images are under the Creative Commons Attribution, Non-commercial License. Copy, modify, and use them all you want, just please give the lab credit.
