Pollen Up-close

Pollen comes in many shapes and sizes. These are just a few of the thousands of examples. Click on any of the pollen grains in the gallery below and use the zoom tool to explore the amazing shapes and textures of pollen. These images are all from a scanning electron microscope (S.E.M.).

In case you are wondering why there are white lines on each image, they are used to show the size of each pollen grain. Microscopists call these lines scale bars, because they let a person know the size of an object. All the white lines below are equal to10 micrometers except Opuntia* which is 25 micrometers.