Backyard and Beyond

Here’s another gall for your collection:
Cypress Twig Gall Midge (Taxodiomyia cupressiananassa).
Affects Bald and Pond Cypresses. I like how they almost kinda look like the cones.
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Yesterday, Trump mafia family members Ivanka and Jared tweeted that they were sending in their mail-in ballots, just hours after Trump railed again against mail-in balloting once again. He’s been lying about this for months to undermine the validity of mail-in ballots, while his own advertisements have been filled with claims he was using a mail-in ballot, going so far as show a close-up of his signature on the alleged mail-in ballot. (He seems to have voted in person in Florida this past weekend.)

Wisconsin’s Koch-funded denial of votes received after Election Day has been cleared by the Supreme Court, 5-3. (Amy Covid Coathanger Barrett would have made that 6-3. She becomes the third member of the radically reactionary SCOTUS supermajority who worked on Bush’s 2000 judicial coup.) In a sinister footnote to this Wisconsin decision, Injustice Kavanaugh has essentially announced his intention to not let votes be counted if it will help his master. The USPS is still run by a Trump loyalist (and private mail delivery profiteer), with all evidence suggesting that ballots are being delayed in the mail.

It now behooves us to vote in person if at all possible. I did it yesterday.

You may be-galled out, but I’m certainly not. All of the above were gleaned from under a great white oak, the mother (?) of galls, on October 10. Five species of gall wasps are represented here.
Pea Gall (Acraspis pezomachoides).
Philonix nigra.
Round Bullet Gall Wasp (Disholcaspis quercusglobulus).
Andricus wendi.
Clustered Midrib Gall Wasp (Andricus dimorphus).
In this latter case, a leaf with most of the cluster still attached had also fallen.

“Galls are highly specialized plant tissues whose development is induced by another organism.”

The relationship is essentially parasitic, says Britain’s Plant Galls: A Photographic Guide, but “few gall-causers seem to cause more than localised, short-term damage to their host plants.” This book continues: “Plant galls can be caused or induced by a very wide variety of organisms, including bacteria, nematodes or eelworms, and even other plants, but most of our galls are caused by insects, mites, or fungi. Although we do not know exactly how the galls are initiated, it seems clear that most gall-causers interfere with the development of the host plants’ cells, either chemically or mechanically, and cause them to develop into gall tissue.”

This Britain’s Plant Galls is good: “Many gall wasps induce no galls of their own but lay their eggs in the galls of other species. Their grubs benefit from the food and shelter found there and, although they do not harm the gall-causers directly, by competing for the food supply they can starve them to death. These ‘lodgers’ are known as inquilines. Quite a few flies have similar life styles. Parasitic species, which include many, often brightly chalcids, actually feed on and kill the rightful occupants of the galls. The female parasite tends to have a long ovipositor with which she penetrates the galls to lays her eggs in or on the host grubs. Strictly speaking, these insects should be called parasitoids because typical parasites do not kill their hosts. Parasitoids also attack the inquilines, and a large gall, such as an oak apple, can house a very large insect community, consisting of dozens of individuals of several different species.”
Here’s a good description of gall-makers in an article on the co-evolution of plants and gall-forcing herbivores like the Cynipid wasps:

“Gallers are specialized herbivores that induce the development of, and feed on, modified host plant tissues that, relative to surrounding nongall tissues, have elevated nutritive value but contain very low concentrations of toxic secondary plant metabolites.” ~ “Extreme Host Plant Conservatism during at Least 20 Million Years of Host Plant Pursuit by Oak Gallwasps” by Stone, et al. Evolution Vol. 63, No. 4 (Apr., 2009), pp. 854-869.

They somehow side-step the plant’s defenses and get better than average food out of the deal. Nice work if you can get it!

From the same article: there are about 1000 oak gall wasp species. They’re associated with oaks (Quercus) and other Fagaceae. Almost all alternate sexual and asexual generations, and each of these generations has a distinct gall — sometimes on other oak species.
You’re unlikely to ever see any of these small wasps unless you raise them yourself, so we know them by their work, the galls themselves.
I’ve logged 26 species of Cynipidae gallwasps in iNaturalist. Twenty-four of these have been in Brooklyn, all in Green-Wood Cemetery but one. (Years ago I also found an oak apple on a Cobble Hill sidewalk, but don’t seem to have preserved any memorial of it. Got my eye out for them now.)

Cecidologist: one who studies galls.

All the gall posts here at B & B.

Andricus quercusstrobilanus on swamp white oak (Quercus bicolor). There’s no common name for this gall-forcing wasp species.
Note the gap here, and the hollows within.
The individual galls brown and shrivel up as they grow. Then they fall to the ground. (I don’t think this is standard for gall wasps in general).
Since this tree had two other similar clusters, I thought it was ok to take a living sample, i.e., no exit holes for the wasp. (Many Cynipid wasps emerge in the fall as a flightless generation. Looks like this species overwinters, however.)
I cut one open.
Behold, the larva!
With something growing on it! So a gall is good protection against the vicissitudes, but it’s not foolproof. There are parasitic inquiline wasps that prey on gall wasps.
There are also parasitic wasps that prey on the parasitic wasps of gall wasps.