[Sound of birds chirping]
[Music plays]
A plants flashy display of colour
tells insects and birds that there’s food here.
Free food!
Sweet and sugary nectar. Irresistible.
But in nature there’s no such thing as a free lunch.
Plants use insects, mammals and birds to transport pollen,
a light grainy powder that sticks to the insects body.
And when it’s re-deposited by the insect on a neighbouring flower
it begins the process of reproduction.
Under the microscope grains of pollen look incredibly varied.
But each species has its own shape and structure
as individual as a fingerprint.
(Andrew Thornhill) Some pollen is really round and has air sacks,
so that’s usually wind pollinated.
Others have spikes on them, so that’s more insect pollinated.
Some are bigger, and they’re pollinated by birds.
But for some of the pollen we don’t really know why
they’re different shapes and sizes and
have different form.
So we’re still working out why there are lots of different types.
(David Lovell) Right now the process of analysing pollen
is pretty much looking down a microscope
at all the different grains.
You can’t look at all the grains, you have to look at a sub-sample.
It’s quite a pain staking approach.
(Narrator) And a job no machine was smart enough to do,
Until now.
(Leanne Bischof) The pollen microscope
is an instrument that is developed by
Massey University in New Zealand
to automatically capture images
of little pollen grains on slides,
to make measurements about those images,
and that will allow you to classify,
identify the type of pollen that that particular grain belongs to.
(Simon Haberle) Well essentially
what the microscope is doing is
trying to find certain shapes and sizes of particles,
and we can actually tell it to find particles of
roughly spherical shape and circumcise range.
So the microscope lens will actually go over that slide
and take a low resolution picture
and then it will shift to a second lens,
and under high magnification the microscope
will then take images of the pollen grain,
right from the top down to the bottom.
And it takes nine images
and stacks those images together, a bit like a pack of cards,
and those nine images will then
be transformed in to a three dimensional image of the pollen grain.
(Leanne Bischof)One of the applications
is to be able to understand the biodiversity in a local environment.
Another is in conjunction with CSIRO entomology;
they’ve got a huge collection of insects
that are used in pollinating.
So not just bees but beetles,
and we’re hoping the instrument will be able to
assist in the assessment of
what species are important to which eco systems.
(John La Salle) Right now
there are over 1,300 different species of bees in Australia,
but for the most part we don’t know what they’re doing
and how they’re doing it.
Here we have a variety of bees in the collection,
they’re data based, we know exactly where they came from,
exactly when they were collected,
and they all have pollen on them.
If we can come in,
automate the process of
figuring out all those pollination associations on all these bees,
we can build a pretty good library very quickly
of pollination biology that’s going to help us understand
the eco system services that are supplied by pollinators.
And help us get the right pieces
when we try and put the puzzle back together of restoring eco systems.
(Narrator) The pollen microscope
is also expected to make a big contribution
to a very ambitious project.
(Donald Hobern) The Atlas of Living Australia
is going to be the largest
integrated aggregation of information about Australian species,
informs that can readily be re-used by researchers.
We do want to make the best possible future for this country,
including the preservation of as much as possible
of the biodiversity around us.
And in order to do that,
understanding what we’ve got now,
what its needs and its characteristics are
is really the base line from which everything else will follow.
Pollen is only one aspect of biodiversity quite clearly.
But we are very interested in the fact that
it does seem that pollen is something which
can very often be identified through the kind
of automated processes we’re talking about.
It’s clearly very important for us to understand
whether plants are going to be able to continue to flower,
develop pollen, to have seeds that are set as climate changes.
And also to make sure that the insects and other organisms that are responsible
for moving pollen between plants
are able to continue to do their job.
And we understand far too little in detail
about the specifics of those interactions.
So putting some focus on pollen,
putting some effort into
improving our ability to recognise pollen from different species,
allows us to start thinking about different
places in that whole chain of connections
where we can do some research
and gain a better understanding of
how effective the pollination services of all those animals really are.
[Music plays]