There is an oak tree in our backyard. It is not my fault, it was there on the lot when we built the house. (I would never purchase an oak tree. Who would? Who would purchase fifty bags of leaves that drop after the first snowfall? Leaves that never decompose: there are leaves wedged in the shrubbery at Mom’s that are older then I am.)
Still, I let the oak live because it was very straight. I use the immortal leaves for mulch. They chip up nicely, and they are very durable.
One day, many years ago, I was alarmed to see some growths on our trees. I was familiar with the bagworm, I researched the orange cypress balls, and I dissected one on the brown balls growing on the limbs of the oak. It was nothing. Just a woody growth. (A hard woody growth. A stiff rapidly expanding growth. This would be fun if I hadn’t just mentioned dissecting.)
The tree pruners were out today, and Gary asked about about the tree tumors. Oh, that’s nothing, they said. It’s just a worm that attaches to the tree and it builds a ball around it. Harmless.
Harmless. Harmless wood balls FULL OF WORMS all over our tree.
Of course, when confronted with terrifying information like THERE ARE WORM BALLS HANGING OVER YOUR HEAD I go to the internet to calm myself.
I found that a “tree ball” is called a “gall.” And it would seem “worm” is the tree man’s term for larvae. What type of larvae? WASP larvae. The larvae matures for a few years in the gall and and then the wasp emerges.
Oh. I’m sorry. Check that. “A gall may contain up to 150 larvae.” So the wasp SWARM emerges.
I had a few moments of comfort when I found there are two types of gall common in my area:
Gouty gall
(Gouty. Tree’s been overeating rich foods.)
and
Horned gall
I was now praying for actual worms instead of wasp larvae, but no. The difference is that on the horned gall, the horns are the escape hatches for the wasps.
I was much happier before I knew wasps were in my oak tree waiting years for the day the emerge. (And you KNOW they all emerge in one day.) (I would look that up but then I’ll find they come out and lay their eggs indoors when the moon has recently been abnormally close to the earth. Or they eat dogs.)
4 responses to “And Now I Can’t Sleep”
Eh. No worries. They don’t sting, they don’t swarm, the adults mostly don’t eat (one variety drinks nectar), they’re tiny, and their abdomens are short and blunt, so they look more like flies than wasps. Their main life is as larvae. The adults, like cicadas, seem to do nothing but lay eggs in twigs, or hide until it’s time to lay eggs.
~~Silk – it seems like an awful lot of effort just to exist.
Yeah. It seems like the only purpose of a lot of organisms is to serve as food for others. These guys don’t even have that excuse.
~~Silk – At least they don’t sting. So, they live to be bird food.