Check out how many galls are forming on the underside of this oak leaf! They remind me of brightly colored candy sprinkles you would use to decorate a cupcake for a kid’s birthday party.
While holding this leaf up to take a photo, it was noticeably heavy from all these galls and it seemed like it could easily become unattached from the additional weight. The top of the leaf was still dark green, so all of these galls didn’t seem to be affecting the leaf’s ability to photosynthesize.
As you can see, two kinds are forming. The Pinched Leaf Gall Wasp looks like a basket or small pastry pinched shut at the top. They can vary in color from tan to red. The other one is a saucer-shaped gall with a brown bump in the middle. That one is identified as an Undescribed Plate Gall Wasp #8. The galls are small and I imagine the wasps that emerge from them are only a couple of millimeters long.
I took this photo where a few small oak trees are growing along the edge where the forest meets the meadow. Many of these young oaks were adorned with leaf and stem galls. I’m not sure why the wasps chose to lay their eggs on these oaks. For some reason they found this area a more suitable location than the oaks out in the meadow where I saw far fewer.