Spring time has officially made its debut with temperatures in the seventies accompanied by a few, classically emotional thunderstorms coming and going as they please. With these conditions, things are bound to happen, and mainly that being an explosion of flora.
Cherry trees in front of Kilgore Hall bring in the good news of spring with small pink flowers, daffodils seemingly appear from no where in the Court of the Carolinas expressing their happiness with shades of yellow and white, while oak trees, like graffiti artists bypassing all boundaries, give every car a paint job in the color of pollen.
All metaphors aside, springtime is essentially a display of the very best and most complex evolutionary inventions of all time.
As humans growing up on planet earth, taking for granted the seasons is easy because they’ve always just existed and cycled. However, curiosity and questioning the establishment are quite common in people and from that come these questions: What is the purpose of pollen? Why do plants have flowers? And why do insects have a symbiotic relationship with plants in bloom?
“Pollen is basically plant sperm,” Bryce Lane, a professor in the horticulture department, said. To understand what pollen is and how it works some terminology is required.
Flower sex parts consist of male stamens and female pistils. Pollen is the product of male stamens and, like all sperm, hope to make it to the tip of the pistil, called the stigma, which then carries the male DNA into the ovary where fruit is then produced. This is where apples and oranges come from, not the stork.
The other use of pollen is that of causing sneezing, coughing and watery eyes.
“I have to take my allergy medicine religiously to keep them at bay,” Ashley Rivers, a senior in English, said.
Allergies caused by pollen affect many students on NC State’s campus and suspiciously coincide with the end of the semester making deadweek live up to its name.
“Allergies really make it uncomfortable to be in class because you don’t want to blow your nose in the middle of class or rustle in your pocket book to get your Kleenexes. It’s just a pain,” Rivers said.
The epic of pollen in the nose that causes allergies is quite different than that of pollen in the pistil. When air enters the nose it gets filtered through hairs and mucus, catching anything especially large.
Then once at the roof of the nasal cavity the tiny smell molecules land on the olfactory epithelium, a patch of nerve cells that connect to the main olfactory nerves in the brain.
When the cilia, microscopic hairlike fibers, on the nerve cells are triggered, they send signals to the brain, which then decides what is being smelled and in the case of allergies what is attacking. The olfactory epithelium is essentially the nose’s switchboard for decoding scents and recognizes what it thinks is an “attacker”.
Allergies are actually a bit of a mystery because pollen is not a threat or dangerous, but the body misinterprets the compounds as problems, which cause it to produce histamines and other chemicals that cause the symptoms of sneezing and coughing.
Just like some people are color blind, some are also scent blind.
“Out of ten people, only a few can smell an amaryllis,” said Bill Cox, a junior in landscape design. “They just don’t have the receptors in their nose to receive the smell,” he said. Cox can smell amaryllis as well as pansies, another difficult flower for some to detect.
On the subject of flowers, that leads to the next two questions: Why do plants have flowers and why do insects like them so much?
“Flowers are advertisements to seduce pollinators such as butterflies, bees, birds, ants, and even beetles,” Lane said.
The relationship that Lane is referring to is the mutualism between flowers and insects, a relationship that was spawned more than 65 million years ago in the Cretaceous period.
Flowers first bloomed during that time which gave rise to insects. Insects eat the nectar, while flowers use them for pollen transit, also known as pollination.
Essentially, every flower or ornament that a plant exhibits was not evolved for N.C. State’s enjoyment, but solely for the attention of pollinators.
Being consistent with that point, certain pollinators are only attracted to certain colors, such as the hummingbird, which goes for red and orange, while the honeybee prefers blue, purple and yellow.
Flower shape is also important in attracting the right pollinator. For the hummingbird, a long tubular flower is needed to facilitate its beak. For the honeybee the flower needs to be either flat or have some sort of landing for the bee to rest on.
It can be known that the pollen is plant sperm, flowers and ornaments exist for the attention from pollinators, and the reason being because 65 million years ago plants and insects co-evolved. Springtime is a great natural display of the pursuit of love, wooing lovers near, something both flora and fauna have in common.
