Crystalline gall wasp
The crystalline gall wasp is a tiny wasp that lives on oak trees in California. It makes the oak grow little pink, hairy balls on its leaves, called galls. Its babies grow up safe inside these galls, like in a fuzzy little house.
How fast is it?
Fun facts
Its galls are pink and covered in white, red or brown hairs, and they often grow in big clumps under the leaves.
One gall is about 12 to 14 millimetres tall, about the size of a pea or a bit bigger.
One generation is made only of females, which can lay eggs without any males.
In spring a generation of males and females makes much smaller galls with shorter hairs, on the top side of the leaves.
It can use every kind of oak tree that grows in California.
Most asked questions about Crystalline gall wasp
?What is a gall?
A gall is a strange bump that a plant grows when an insect changes how it grows. The baby wasp lives and eats inside it.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Feron crystallinum
- Group
- Wasps and hornets
- Family
- Cynipidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Hymenoptera > Cynipidae
- Lives on
- North America
Where the facts come from
- Feron crystallinum (Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0): what it looks like, where it lives, what it eats, sizes and fun facts, retold in simple words.
- Picture by Franco Folini from San Francisco, USA. CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons. The sticker of this bug is drawn from this picture.
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