the.com/gallfly
a tiny architect that hijacks plants into building it a free, living nursery.
means A gallfly is any of various small insects, especially certain wasps and flies, whose larvae trigger plants to grow abnormal swellings called galls that shelter and feed the developing young.
from The 'gall' here is the plant swelling, from Old English 'galla' or Latin 'galla,' a word for the oak-apple and similar growths long before anyone understood insects caused them. (It's a separate word from the 'gall' meaning bile or bitterness, though both trace back to a root tangle worth untangling another day.) Yoked to 'fly,' the old catch-all for any flying insect, the name simply labels the creature by the strange fruit it leaves behind — the bump was named first, the architect second.
- plant hijacker
- chemicals force trees to grow custom shelters
- name origin
- galls are the swellings they trick plants into
- built-in pantry
- larvae eat the very walls protecting them
- species count
- thousands of gall-makers across flies and wasps
- oak ink
- their galls once made medieval writing ink
cynips quercusfolii — oak apple gall wasp that creates spherical galls on oak trees, causing disfigurement across europe and north america
diplolepis rosae — rose bedeguar gall wasp that produces distinctive hairy, red-pink galls on wild roses throughout the northern hemisphere
andricus quercuscalicis — knopper gall wasp that transforms acorns into grotesque spiky structures on oak trees in europe and asia