I know you’re all just dying to find out more about oak galls, right? RIGHT? I also know that I covered spangles in a previous post (see Currants & spangles here) but there are two different spangle galls to be found on the much be-galled oak tree: one is the hairy Common spangle and this is the second, the Smooth spangle gall.

This pretty little gall comes in combinations of pink and yellowish-green. It’s the work of Neuroterus albipes, a tiny wasp that you will probably never see, and inside each colourful saucer is a single larva that you will also probably never see. The galls drop to the ground in autumn and the larvae pupate over winter then female-only wasps hatch out in Spring to lay eggs that cause the entirely different Schenck’s gall (not one I’ve yet seen), from which male and female wasp hatch in the summertime. And so the cycle begins again.

This second gall, the Oyster gall, is also caused by a tiny wasp that has two distinct generations and forms two different galls. The wasp is Neuroterus anthracinus and the Oyster gall also contains the agamic generation of wasps (i.e. the females that need no males to fertilise their eggs). As you can see, these galls form on the veins on the undersides of oak leaves – once they’ve fallen to the ground, you can still see the two brown flaps of tissue where they were attached to the veins. 

Once again, the sexual generation of wasps hatch in the Spring to mate and lay their eggs, this time in the buds of the oak tree, hence the name of the gall they produce: the April-bud gall. That’s another I need to look out for come the Spring.