May 24, 2023 • 12 mins
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.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
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 chew edition. Hold
on the edition.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
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.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
Yeah, you grew into him. That's fantastic.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
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 listen to our show. But we want to
think how stuff works. And 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
(00:59):
and I never stopped to think, is someone counting polland like,
how did they even get that number?
Speaker 1 (01:03):
The answer is absolutely yes. In that nuts it surprised me.
We'll get to that, but just a little brush up
on Paul and 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 carpul the
female part. And pollen. I mean, especially you, Chuck. I'm
sure you see it everywhere because it's affecting you. You
(01:25):
want to get away from it. Whole drifts of it
just coat the cars in Georgia. Like seriously, everybody, if
you have never really experienced pallend, 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
(01:47):
an individual grain of pollend is in every case microscopic,
from ten micrometers to one hundred micrometers, very very small still,
but they clump together, which is what produces those visible
drifts of pollen.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
Yeah, and you know the other thing that pallen 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 like take care of your car or your deck
or whatever, like it will bake into whatever it's on.
Speaker 1 (02:17):
Yeah, definitely. Don't you have some pressure washing to do?
Speaker 2 (02:21):
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 you know, weeks
and sometimes a month at a time. And this thing
every single year is just has caked on, baked on
pollen that you can't wash off. You have to get
a pressure washer on it.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
While, all right. So pollen gets places in a couple
of ways, as everybody knows, it 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
(03:12):
sampling a bunch of bees and counting up the pollen
drains on their cute little furry, fuzzy legs. They're trying
to get to what's in the air, because that's the
pollen count that counts.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
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 you know, 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
(03:43):
that you have to know how to do if you're
counting pollen is to know what each different type of pollen.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
Looks like.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
Grain. That's what I was after, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
Looks like yeah. So because when you watch the news,
they'll say, like, pollen count is I And if they
really know what they're doing, they'll say, you know, look
out today for ragweed or something like that exactly.
Speaker 1 (04:04):
And I say, we take a little break and we'll
get into just precisely how they do that right after this.
Speaker 2 (04:09):
Let's do it. Well, now we're on the road driving
in your truck. I want to learn a thing or
two from Josh.
Speaker 1 (04:18):
Chuck.
Speaker 2 (04:19):
It's stuff you should know.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
Should all right, okay, Chuck, So we were talking about
people actually counting pollen, and that pollen grains are microscopic,
(04:44):
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.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
That's right. Specifically, a pollen count is the number of
pollen grains and a cubic meter of air over one day,
over a twenty four hour period. And I guess carry
got in touch with someone when this article was written
from Atlanta, because because one Katie Walls was interviewed a
(05:13):
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,
(05:35):
Asthma and Immunology to be like as certified. Hey, they
know what they're doing, pollen counter.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
So what Katie Walls, the meteorologist explained is that in
that cubic meter of air that they're sampling over a
twenty four 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
(06:05):
of air. Again, a cubic meter of air is typically
what's sampled, and again it's usually over twenty four 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.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
Yeah, we have some brand names here. We're happy to
buzzmarket the rotating arm sampler. I'm sorry, impactor. It seems
like the most common one is the rotor rode, and
then of the hearst variety of the burchard sampler. Sure,
and I look both these up, as I'm sure you did.
But if you look at a picture, the rotor ride
looks like like just a little spinny contraption on a
(06:43):
big tripod. The burchard looks to me like a little
bit like a camp stove or something. And they operate,
or at least the first one, the rotor ride, is
fairly intuitive. It does rotate, it starts spinning around really fast,
about twenty four hundred revolutions per minute, and these two
little grease rods drop down and they literally just capture pollen.
(07:06):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:18):
Right, that's one way. The other way, the hearst type
that the Burchard is an example of. It actually sucks
in air over twenty four 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
(07:39):
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 paullen
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. Palanologist studies pollen and actual palinologist
(08:03):
studies live pollen. They're the ones who actually do the
pollen count, and they actually count the pollen spores in
their sample.
Speaker 2 (08:13):
Yeah. So if you, like me, thought that a pollen
count was just some like 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.
(08:34):
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 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
(08:55):
a city and maybe how much pollen you have in
general as to how this goes down.
Speaker 1 (08:59):
Yeah, I could see city government having to be fairly
flushed to invest in a Pallen counting station.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
You think, how much are they?
Speaker 1 (09:09):
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 off, you want to show
up Shelbyville, so you get your Pallen counting station. Yeah,
I gotcha, 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,
(09:31):
it's not that big. And what they're saying is, if
there's like a like we're at three thousand level, which
is extremely high, there are three thousand grains of pallen
in that cubic meter over the course of twenty four
hours or at any given point in that twenty four hours,
which means that you're sucking all that in. So it
really kind of drives home like what those numbers mean.
(09:53):
I mean, yeah, three thousand sounds way higher than say
two hundred or fifty or whatever. But when you put
it in that perspective, it's almost it almost makes you choke.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
Yeah. I wonder if any place places these in different
places to compare those numbers, probably like a really rich city,
like I mean, it would I mean maybe 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
(10:23):
parking lot. Right, sure, you'd think so it's airborne, but
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
No, No, it definitely because it's gonna spread out from
that forest, you know, so yeah, it would be denser there.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
I wonder where they put these things in.
Speaker 1 (10:33):
I don't know, but you're probably 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.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
That's right, you got to get to that forest. So
there's a.
Speaker 1 (10:46):
Couple of other things that this House Stuff Works article
included about paulin that I found gratifying that they were saying, like, yes,
paulind makes you sneeze and it can give you terrible allergies,
but it's also useful in other ways. And the actual
palinologiststudy live pollen, but there's other kinds of palinologists that
study fossilized pollen or they use it for crime fighting.
Speaker 2 (11:10):
Yeah, because that could be your alibi if there's pollen
on the scene and they say that that you were there,
and 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 rap totally.
Speaker 1 (11:29):
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
(11:49):
why is because when when a plant evolves, it's pollen morphology.
It doesn't change even over millions and millions of years.
So if you found a piece of rag, we'd paullen
fossilize into you know, a strata that's sixty million years old,
you know that there was actually ragweed growing there because
it matches the ragweed morphology today.
Speaker 2 (12:10):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
You got anything else?
Speaker 2 (12:13):
I've got nothing else, just snotty nose.
Speaker 1 (12:16):
Okay, Well, good luck with that, Chuck, And since I
wish Chuck good luck. Short Stuff is out.
Speaker 2 (12:25):
Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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 chew edition. Hold
on the edition.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
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.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
Yeah, you grew into him. That's fantastic.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
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 listen to our show. But we want to
think how stuff works. And 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
(00:59):
and I never stopped to think, is someone counting polland like,
how did they even get that number?
Speaker 1 (01:03):
The answer is absolutely yes. In that nuts it surprised me.
We'll get to that, but just a little brush up
on Paul and 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 carpul the
female part. And pollen. I mean, especially you, Chuck. I'm
sure you see it everywhere because it's affecting you. You
(01:25):
want to get away from it. Whole drifts of it
just coat the cars in Georgia. Like seriously, everybody, if
you have never really experienced pallend, 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
(01:47):
an individual grain of pollend is in every case microscopic,
from ten micrometers to one hundred micrometers, very very small still,
but they clump together, which is what produces those visible
drifts of pollen.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
Yeah, and you know the other thing that pallen 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 like take care of your car or your deck
or whatever, like it will bake into whatever it's on.
Speaker 1 (02:17):
Yeah, definitely. Don't you have some pressure washing to do?
Speaker 2 (02:21):
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 you know, weeks
and sometimes a month at a time. And this thing
every single year is just has caked on, baked on
pollen that you can't wash off. You have to get
a pressure washer on it.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
While, all right. So pollen gets places in a couple
of ways, as everybody knows, it 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
(03:12):
sampling a bunch of bees and counting up the pollen
drains on their cute little furry, fuzzy legs. They're trying
to get to what's in the air, because that's the
pollen count that counts.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
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 you know, 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
(03:43):
that you have to know how to do if you're
counting pollen is to know what each different type of pollen.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
Looks like.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
Grain. That's what I was after, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
Looks like yeah. So because when you watch the news,
they'll say, like, pollen count is I And if they
really know what they're doing, they'll say, you know, look
out today for ragweed or something like that exactly.
Speaker 1 (04:04):
And I say, we take a little break and we'll
get into just precisely how they do that right after this.
Speaker 2 (04:09):
Let's do it. Well, now we're on the road driving
in your truck. I want to learn a thing or
two from Josh.
Speaker 1 (04:18):
Chuck.
Speaker 2 (04:19):
It's stuff you should know.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
Should all right, okay, Chuck, So we were talking about
people actually counting pollen, and that pollen grains are microscopic,
(04:44):
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.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
That's right. Specifically, a pollen count is the number of
pollen grains and a cubic meter of air over one day,
over a twenty four hour period. And I guess carry
got in touch with someone when this article was written
from Atlanta, because because one Katie Walls was interviewed a
(05:13):
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,
(05:35):
Asthma and Immunology to be like as certified. Hey, they
know what they're doing, pollen counter.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
So what Katie Walls, the meteorologist explained is that in
that cubic meter of air that they're sampling over a
twenty four 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
(06:05):
of air. Again, a cubic meter of air is typically
what's sampled, and again it's usually over twenty four 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.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
Yeah, we have some brand names here. We're happy to
buzzmarket the rotating arm sampler. I'm sorry, impactor. It seems
like the most common one is the rotor rode, and
then of the hearst variety of the burchard sampler. Sure,
and I look both these up, as I'm sure you did.
But if you look at a picture, the rotor ride
looks like like just a little spinny contraption on a
(06:43):
big tripod. The burchard looks to me like a little
bit like a camp stove or something. And they operate,
or at least the first one, the rotor ride, is
fairly intuitive. It does rotate, it starts spinning around really fast,
about twenty four hundred revolutions per minute, and these two
little grease rods drop down and they literally just capture pollen.
(07:06):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:18):
Right, that's one way. The other way, the hearst type
that the Burchard is an example of. It actually sucks
in air over twenty four 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
(07:39):
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 paullen
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. Palanologist studies pollen and actual palinologist
(08:03):
studies live pollen. They're the ones who actually do the
pollen count, and they actually count the pollen spores in
their sample.
Speaker 2 (08:13):
Yeah. So if you, like me, thought that a pollen
count was just some like 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.
(08:34):
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 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
(08:55):
a city and maybe how much pollen you have in
general as to how this goes down.
Speaker 1 (08:59):
Yeah, I could see city government having to be fairly
flushed to invest in a Pallen counting station.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
You think, how much are they?
Speaker 1 (09:09):
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 off, you want to show
up Shelbyville, so you get your Pallen counting station. Yeah,
I gotcha, 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,
(09:31):
it's not that big. And what they're saying is, if
there's like a like we're at three thousand level, which
is extremely high, there are three thousand grains of pallen
in that cubic meter over the course of twenty four
hours or at any given point in that twenty four hours,
which means that you're sucking all that in. So it
really kind of drives home like what those numbers mean.
(09:53):
I mean, yeah, three thousand sounds way higher than say
two hundred or fifty or whatever. But when you put
it in that perspective, it's almost it almost makes you choke.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
Yeah. I wonder if any place places these in different
places to compare those numbers, probably like a really rich city,
like I mean, it would I mean maybe 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
(10:23):
parking lot. Right, sure, you'd think so it's airborne, but
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
No, No, it definitely because it's gonna spread out from
that forest, you know, so yeah, it would be denser there.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
I wonder where they put these things in.
Speaker 1 (10:33):
I don't know, but you're probably 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.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
That's right, you got to get to that forest. So
there's a.
Speaker 1 (10:46):
Couple of other things that this House Stuff Works article
included about paulin that I found gratifying that they were saying, like, yes,
paulind makes you sneeze and it can give you terrible allergies,
but it's also useful in other ways. And the actual
palinologiststudy live pollen, but there's other kinds of palinologists that
study fossilized pollen or they use it for crime fighting.
Speaker 2 (11:10):
Yeah, because that could be your alibi if there's pollen
on the scene and they say that that you were there,
and 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 rap totally.
Speaker 1 (11:29):
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
(11:49):
why is because when when a plant evolves, it's pollen morphology.
It doesn't change even over millions and millions of years.
So if you found a piece of rag, we'd paullen
fossilize into you know, a strata that's sixty million years old,
you know that there was actually ragweed growing there because
it matches the ragweed morphology today.
Speaker 2 (12:10):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
You got anything else?
Speaker 2 (12:13):
I've got nothing else, just snotty nose.
Speaker 1 (12:16):
Okay, Well, good luck with that, Chuck, And since I
wish Chuck good luck. Short Stuff is out.
Speaker 2 (12:25):
Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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