With your next breath of spring air, you'll pull dozens of invaders through your nose. These intruders may make your nose drip and your eyes red and watery. The airborne invaders are grains of tree pollen, specks so small that it would take eight of them to cover the period at the end of this sentence. The air is rich with pollen because spring is the mating season for trees. The first step in a tree's reproductive dance is to release sperm, held in the center of a pollen grain.
Trees release an incredible amount of pollen to improve the odds of finding a female flower.
Birch is the worst of the Alaska pollen types for allergy sufferers, said Jim Anderson, BioSciences Librarian for the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Anderson, featured in last week's column on greenup, also has a passion for pollen. He's been studying it for years with an air-sniffing instrument mounted on top of the building in which he works. Looking at years of data, he has found a few trends in the way trees and other plants release pollen. As reported last week, Anderson found that birch trees begin releasing pollen about two days before leaves emerge from buds, and the concentration of birch pollen is greatest about three days after the leaves come out.