Galls: Amazingly Diverse and Fascinating Plant Growths

Have you ever found a leaf with weird little balls or spiky things attached to it? Or found a plant with a weird growth on its stem or a dense clump of leaves growing out of an odd place? Chances are those were galls.
Louis Nastasi joins backyard Ecology podcast for this conversation. Louis is a PhD candidate at Penn State’s Frost Entomological Museum which is Penn State’s research collection of insects and other arthropods. His research is looking at gall wasps in prairie plants, particularly Silphiums, of the Midwest.
At its most basic level, a gall is a piece of plant tissue that has been modified by the activity of another organism. However, in reality, galls are so much more than that implies. They can be formed by a variety of different organisms, although most of the ones we think about and encounter are formed by different types of insects. They can also be found in a variety of different places on the plant, including hidden inside the stem in such a way that you would never know it was there unless you cut the stem open.
The conversation touches on all kinds of topics related to galls - what they are and the types of organisms that can form them, insect-induced galls, why insects might choose to form a gall in this plant over that plant, the importance of galls and the ecosystem, and how little we actually know about galls.

https://www.backyardecology.net/galls-amazingly-diverse-and-fascinating-plant-growths/