Of Plants and Sex

You may ask yourself "What IS this yellow stuff that's covering everything?" And you may ask yourself "Why does it make me sneeze and cough?" And you may tell yourself "This is not my beautiful house."Sorry, got off track there. **grins**

Okay, back to the original post. That yellow stuff everywhere is pollen. Okay, yeah, great, but what is pollen? Well, the simple answer is that it's plant sperm.

Wait, what?! Plant sperm? Plants have sperm? Yes indeedy they do. Plants, most of them at any rate, use sexual reproduction to make more plants. No, that doesn't mean that they have sex. What it means is that plants have male reproductive cells (pollen) and female reproductive cells (eggs.) Some plants have genders and are either male or female, while other plants have both male and female parts. Most flowers are like that. They contain a pistil (the female parts that make eggs) and stamen (the male parts that make pollen).



(The pistil is made up of the stigma, the style and the ovary)

Pollen can be transferred by animals, such as bees or hummingbirds. This is a very efficient way to transfer pollen. Most of our food crops are pollinated by honey bees. Incidentally, honey bees all over the world are dying, and we don't know why. Stop and think about the effect of losing all of our bees. Now have some respect for the humble honey bee.


But other plants use a less direct method. They just release their pollen to be blown by the wind all over the place. A very tiny amount of the pollen actually lands on the pistil of another plant of the same species. The rest of the pollen lands on your car, or your home, or in your nose.




And speaking of your nose, let's talk about allergies. Allergies happen when your body overreacts to a harmless foreign substance, in this case pollen. The pollen enters your nose. If you're not allergic, the only thing that happens is that you get yellow snot. (Don't believe me? Go outside for a while, then blow your nose and look at the tissue. Told you so.) If you ARE allergic, your body decides that it's being invaded by Something Bad and goes into full battle mode.

Your nasal tissues swell, partially blocking your nose. This prevents more of the 'harmful' substance from getting in. Your nose makes more mucous. This catches any foreign substance and pushes it back out. You cough and sneeze more, which forces that nasty invader right back out. Your eyes may water, again to flush out any strange new stuff. So all of the symptoms of an allergic reaction are actually very reasonable and good. The problem is that your body is doing all of this for no good reason.



These symptoms are caused by chemicals in your body called "histamines." So when they are over reacting and you want to stop the symptoms of an allergic reaction, you take "anti-histamines."

Bet you'll never look at pollen the same way again.