Author(s)

Marcela Sánchez-Ocampo¹, Giovanni Andrés Vargas-Bautista²

¹Department of Natural History, Costa Rica National Museum, San José, Costa Rica.
²Mengo Agropecuary Center, National University of Colombia, Bogotá, Colombia.

Pollen is a resistance structure whose shape, size, and ornaments together make up a diagnostic method for species identification, comparable to a fingerprint. Traditional methods for cleaning this grain, such as acetolysis, not only seriously damage the pollen material of various botanical groups, but its use requires access to expensive reagents and equipment. Therefore, a low-cost proposal is presented for the fixation of fresh pollen in the field, whose preparations are suitable for depositing in biological reference collections, and can be reviewed with an optical microscope.

Biological Collections, Light Microscopy, Palynology, Pollinators

Sánchez-Ocampo, M. and Vargas-Bautista, G.A. (2023) Field Conservation of Fresh Pollen for Rapid Ecological Studies of Pollination Biology. Open Access Library Journal, 10, 1-7. doi: 10.4236/oalib.1109804.