Small World

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Germinating Mallow pollen being parasitized by a filamentous fungus, Igor Robert Siwanowicz, 2025

This image shows several pollen grains resting on the stigma of a mallow flower. The larger grains are from the mallow, the smaller – from an aster flower. The larger grains are germinating – releasing their pollen tubes carrying male gametes down to the ovules contained at the base of the flower. The process of fertilization was unlikely to have had occurred in this case – the thin, segmented strands wrapping around the pollen grains and branching inside of them are the hyphae of a filamentous parasitic fungus, possibly from the genus Cladosporium or Alternaria. Mallow pollen reaches up to 150 micrometers in diameter; daisy pollen is about 20 micrometers.

I was reading the New York Times this morning and found an article that described Nikon’s Small World video and photography competitions, which have just closed for 2026. The photography competition has been occurring for fifty years. However, the Times article focused on the newer video completion. Both contests are fascinating. I chose just one photo to highlight the quality of all this work. This picture placed eighth last year. It ably illustrates the titanic struggles occurring all the time in this lilliputian world right under our nose.

I just love the phrase “filamentous fungus”. Doesn’t it just make your skin crawl?

A Shot in the Arm

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SARS-CoV-2

Anne and I trooped down to the pharmacy this morning and got vaccinated twice. Once for the flu and again for covid. In two-week’s time, when the vaccines finally take effect, we will be prepared. Surveying the pharmacy staff, three of whom were out sick, we may be on the late side for this year’s respiratory infection season. Better late than never. With the mercury still in the high nineties, it seems early for these preparations, but your body needs time to build its immunity. Go get your shots today! Why wait? Life is fleeting and precious. Protect it!

Wedding at Sodom

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Wedding at Sodom, Kent Monkman, 2017

From the earliest days of his career, Kent Monkman has been a master of pastiche in many media, borrowing from the tropes of art history, including the landscape paintings of the Hudson River School, early cinema, and the nineteenth-century daguerreotypes of Indigenous touring performers in the popular Wild West shows. This painting is part of Monkman’s ongoing reimagining of the history of North America. The artist’s alter ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, rides in on horseback to deliver the arrow of desire to a hunky cowboy, while a gay marriage unfolds in the foreground. Monkman’s Wedding at Sodom commemorates the early nineteenth-century “rendezvous” that took place in the American West in which settler and Indigenous merchants, ministers, traders, and fur trappers would meet to trade and mingle, sometimes for rowdy weeks on end. Monkman gives the rendezvous a two-spirited spin, suggesting that these gatherings offered many settler men liberation from the repressive confines of European gender and social roles. A subtle note of tragedy is struck in the figure of the young Indigenous woman being carried off at right, an early victim of the smallpox epidemics that swept through Indigenous communities following contact with settlers.