31 Might 2025
Oak apple galls are shiny and brown so I used to be shocked to search out this fuzzy one on a white oak stem. This not a fuzzy model of the oak apple gall. This can be a woolly oak gall made by a very totally different species of gall wasp (household Cynipidae).
Woolly oak galls are made by Callirhytis seminator, “the wool sower,” which locations its galls solely on white oaks and solely within the spring.
The wasps are tiny, 1/8″ lengthy, and have many predators together with bigger parasitic wasps. They don’t sting people.
Gall wasps have a two-generation alternating cycle: One technology produces stem galls, and the wasps that emerge from that stem gall mature and lay their very own eggs in leaf galls. The wasps that emerge from the leaf gall mature and produce stem galls. Scientists have no idea what the alternate wool sower wasp gall appears to be like like.
The gall I discovered and the one pictured beneath have been made by the stem-gall technology.
If you happen to open the gall it has seed-like constructions inside which are really plant materials, not the insect. The larvae are white and fats, don’t have any legs.
Because the gall matures it turns pink.
If I’m going again to Raccoon Wildflower Reserve in a couple of weeks and discover the identical tree the gall received’t look the identical. Will it even be there?
