If I had to rank some of the things that blow the most on this blue marble we inhabit, the first would be mosquitoes. Second, I would put the CollegeBoard. At a respectable third place – pollen.
The Birds and the Trees
Many people don’t associate sexual identity with plants but they actually reproduce similarly to many animals. Put simply, there are boy plants and girl plants. Boy plants create pollen and girl plants create seeds. Pollen comes into contact with the seeds, which often allows trees to reproduce in the form of fruit or flowers that release these seeds. I’ll let you draw the parallels between tree and human reproduction yourself.
Before we continue, a quick disclaimer. What I just explained is a gross oversimplification. For trees, sex is complex and not nearly as binary as it is for animals. Some trees are strictly “male” or “female” while others contain functions of both sexes. For this article, the concept is most easily understood if you imagine plant sexuality as binary.
What matters is the “male” trees. Before everyone on team testosterone gets too excited, they don’t matter in a good way. Boy trees create an abundance of pollen that causes allergies in many people – including me!
You may wonder how the pollen gets everywhere. It should be absorbed by the female tree’s seeds. Surely they aren’t all bad shots. Well, let me ask you, how often do you see trees bearing fruit or flowers? Not too often right? There aren’t many female trees in our hometown of Cresskill.
Bad Ratio
At the beginning of the 20th century, a fungal disease called the “Dutch Elm Disease” was spread to America by bark beetles stowed in cargo ships. The trees began to die which left America’s greatest minds to come up with a solution to repopulate the trees in the US.
They realized it was easier to clone trees than to let them naturally repopulate. Cloning trees means you don’t necessarily have to have both “male” and “female” trees which led to another brilliant idea. They decided to only clone male trees. This would both repopulate the trees and get rid of all the pesky fruit that littered the street back when both types of trees were around.
That is why in the present day there are significantly more male trees than female trees. Without any female trees to pollinate, the pollen gets in the air in high concentrations which triggers allergies.
The more clever readers may be wondering why they didn’t decide to clone female trees instead. After all, if they cloned female trees and not male trees there would be no pollen from the trees and no fruit because of the aforementioned lack of pollen. The sad answer is they simply didn’t think of that.
Don’t Touch your Eyes
If you’re struggling with allergies in Cresskill right now, I don’t blame you. This year has been bad and all signs point to the pollen crisis staying for a while. So what can we do to survive?
Always start with the basics. When you come home after going outside, take a shower or wash your hands. I hope you did that before but it is especially important now. This decreases the chance of you exposing yourself to pollen indoors.
Take medicine. Allergy medicine isn’t harmful if taken according to the instructions. Most medications can be taken once a day. Doctors actually recommend taking the medicine daily during the winter to build up the medicine in your system before spring hits. It’s too late to do that this year but next year you can be ready.
And lastly, don’t touch your eyes. Just trust me on this one.
