It’s important to me that everyone knows that standard practice is to literally count all the pollen that is collected from a cubic meter of air. Manually. With a microscope.
They probably don’t do this with pollen because you’d get RSI pretty quick, but when we had to count bacteria in the lab we’d sometimes use a clicky thing where every time you pushed the clicky button the number it displayed would go up by 1. This was handy if you were only counting a few hundred bacteria and didn’t want to lose count.
yeah but how do you make sure you don’t count the same one twice. Or miss any
When we do bacteria we put it on a slide like this:
that lets you count cell by cell. This makes it far easier not to lose count. If the sample is too dense, you can dilute it and multiply your results after counting.
