the.com/gallwasp
a tiny architect that tricks oak trees into growing nurseries for its young
means A gallwasp is any of numerous tiny wasps that lay their eggs in plant tissue—often oak—prompting the plant to grow a protective swelling, or gall, around the developing larvae.
from A plain English compound: "gall" plus "wasp." The "gall" part comes from Old English "gealla," related to the Latin "galla" meaning oak-apple—that round, swollen growth on a leaf or twig. The same word doubled as the name for a sore or blister, since both are angry-looking swellings; the wasp simply took the name of the strange fruit it conjures. "Wasp" descends from Old English "wæsp," a cousin of words across the Germanic and Latin worlds (Latin "vespa"), possibly rooted in an ancient sense of "weaving" or "spinning," perhaps for the nest-builders' craft.
- mind control
- chemically hijacks plant cells to build custom galls
- virgin births
- alternates sexual and all-female cloning generations
- ink history
- oak galls made ink for centuries of documents
- tiny size
- most measure just a few millimeters long
- nested guests
- other wasps invade and squat in their galls
fig gallwasp — blastophaga psenes, wasp that pollinates figs while laying eggs in fig flowers
oak gallwasp — cynipidae family, creates galls on oak trees across europe and north america