Diario del proyecto Plant Galls of Britain & Ireland

This year's Gall Week caught me slightly by surprise, but with enough lihht left on Saturday afternoon to find 20 galls in the garden, local churchyard and our road. Many of you will have already been messaged by @giusy87, so apologies if this duplicates their message, or if you are already participating.

The project runs all of this week until Sunday 15th. Adding records is a little more work as they need to be added to the project explicitly (in the Android app I find it works better before adding an iD, and the annotations dont seem to work so I ignore them).

If you fancy partipating the project page is here: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/gall-week-september-2024 .

Meanwhile this project looks to be on course for 50000 records around the end of September.

SK53

Cc:

@steve_mcwilliam
@susan_marley
@andydonegan
@yannah_dru
@jamie-aa
@zekemarshall
@swimjamie
@wildhamandpetersham
@cmarkwilson
@major_bombylius
@astrapia

For some reason I had not noticed that mites from the family Phytoptidae (mainly genus Phytoptus) had not been included in the project. The major effect of adding it is to include numerous sightings of the Hazel Big Bud causer, Phytoptus avellenae. Most of the other potential taxa added have very few sightings, but perhaps their appearance in the project might encourage others to look for them.

SK53

I don't look at Twitter very much these days, so have been missing tweets from the British Plant Gall Society (BPGS). However, I saw this one the other day:

Gall of the week is that of the mite Aceria tenella on hornbeam Carpinus betulus. Can be looked for now.
Photo by Graham Calow.
A reminder that not all galls are spectacular and colourful! pic.twitter.com/uURpqTdpvq

— British Plant Galls (@britgalls) May 9, 2024

This gall appeared relatively recently in my local patch on Hornbeams planted around 25 years ago. The only other location I know around Nottingham is Martins Pond, Wollaton.

As with many galls caused by mites in leaves these appear more or less as soon as the leaves open. Mites overwinter under bud scales and move onto the leaves immediately. There are Lime leaves opening now which are distorted by galls of Eriophyes exilis in the leaf axils. Although the galls are often there, they can initially be hard to find: red galls such as the Sycamore Cherry mite often are green to start with; erinea, hairy patches, can be almost invisible initially. It doesn't help that fresh leaves often have hairs which soon disappear (especially in leaf vein axils.) One consequence is that it is often

Anyway I looked for Aceria tenella yesterday, and found it very quickly. Here are the upper and lower side of a galled leaf:

and an ungalled leaf for comparison:

This gall is widespread, but so far we only have 14 observations on iNaturalist. The easiest way to look for it is to push a branch of the tree upwards so that one can scan the underside of many leaves for the tufts of hairs in the leaf axils.

A big thank you to @astrapia for spotting some organisms and groups of organisms missing from the project.

I've added the following groups:

• All members of the Psylloidea superfamily. Previously I just looked for Psyllidae and Triozidae, but this missed out Livia and Psyllopsis which are now in Lividae.
• Scale insects: Chinapsis salicis and the Asterodiapsis oak scales
• Hexomyia and Euhexomyia twig-galler moths
• Claviceps ergot fungi
• Chlrops flies
• Tetramesa, gall wasps on grasses (in the superfamily Chalcidoidea not Cynipoidea).

I'm aware that no weevils are currently included in the scope. I'll review how to do this and add them shortly.

Three genera of willow galling sawflies, Pontania, Eupontania and Phyllocolpa, are now all subsumed in Euura, which will allow the removal of the rules collecting these insects.

If anyone spots other omissions do let me know, via comments or DM. The advantage of a collection project is that once the rule is update it applies to all observations not just those going forward.

Last year some gall observers posted observations to the Gall Week 2021 project. This year Gall Week will be from Saturday, Sept. 3rd to Sunday, Sept. 11th. This is peak season for galls in Britain & Ireland so I hope we may add more observations & species than last year. I'll be tagging some particularly prolific gallers in a subsequent post inviting them to join the Gall Week 2022 project.

Note all observations have to be added to the project, unlike this one where observations are collected based on location and some taxonomic rules (which is why some non-galling organisms appear). I think one has to be a member too.

A worldwide project for recording galls will take place in early October (2nd to 10th): 2021 Gall Week .

Observations need to be added to the project, but it may be interesting & fun to participate.