#galls

If ten million wasps arise

Okay, so this is really cool! You have this phenomenon where some plants grow edible appendages to their seeds to entice ants to carry them underground where they can safely sprout. And then you have wasps which lay their eggs on the leaves, stems, and other parts of plants and trigger the growth of galls (swellings) which both feed and protect the wasp larvae until they reach maturity.

The boy who was watching the ants noticed they were taking wasp galls underground, too. Further exploration found that the wasp larvae were unharmed inside the galls; the only thing the ants had eaten were edible appendages similar to those on the seeds they collected. The wasp larvae stayed safe inside the ant nest, feeding on their galls, until it was time to emerge and head back out to the surface.

although they're a fairly generic if slightly spikier brown Andricus orb later in life, Andricus quercustozae galls start out as swollen green buds that quickly turn into these pleasant little cartoon suns. they also attract lots of parasitoids for bonus critter sightings, but you need to be careful when photographing those up close - not because they're easily scared, but because the galls are real icky sticky at this stage

Regardless, it was very exciting to see, and I want to share!

Lovation is mid-atlantic, usa

Ok, so I believe these wasps are in the family Torymidae... they are parasitoids on gall forming wasps. So, they are probably gathering to insert their ovipositors into the galls to lay eggs on the wasp larvae that formed the galls.

Torymidae - Wikipedia

Family Torymidae - BugGuide.Net

some galls I saw this year

top row: ram's-horn & spangle gall wasps, on oaks

[PHOTOS TAKEN: APRIL 13TH, 2026 | Image IDs: two photos showing the cross section of an "oak apple" gall, with a green outside and fibrous white inside, the core at the center being hard and yellow. The last two show the core cut open to expose the beige larva inside /End IDs.]

Disclaimer!: I would not recommend doing this to oak apples, as neither the oak apple galls nor the wasps that produce them are dangerous to the oak tree, and doing this to an oak apple like this will kill the wasp inside. The only reason why I myself cut this gall open is because 1. The gall had already fallen off of the tree, so it wasn't going to be getting any more nutrients from it, and 2. I wasn't actually initially certain what it was (though I did know it was a gall).

This is a kind of oak apple! It's a gall produced by gall wasps of the family Cynipidae, the larva injects chemicals into a leaf of an oak tree that create this round ball of fibrous plant material, the larva living in the center of this ball and sapping nutrients from the leaf!