What can a tiny wasp with a rather gruesome parasitic life cycle teach us about evolution, behavior and human developmental ...

Galls are abnormal growths and can be caused by a variety of different organisms, including insects and mites, and ...

For more than a hundred years, scientists have studied the strange partnership between ants and seeds. In this relationship, ...

The gall serves to protect the young, developing larva from predators and other species of parasitic wasps. In many cases the gall provides a source of nutritious food for the growing larva.

Inside 20 galls, all larvae survived; in 23, only some of them came out alive; while in nine galls all weevils succumbed to the flames. “The thicker the epidermis, the greater the weevil ...

Keywords insects, homes, life cycle, cocoon, larvae, pupa, webworms, spittle bug, gall wasp, beetle, ants, cicada, ant lion, caddis fly, wasp, honey bee Email us at [email protected] if you have ...

The Citrus gall wasp is an Australian native insect originally from northern ... and the tree reacts by producing distinctive galls around the developing larvae. Adult wasps then emerge from galls.

The process of forming a gall begins when a wasp the size of a tiny gnat (see image below) lays its eggs on an oak tree branch. The eggs hatch, and larvae (also called grubs) emerge. Either the egg or ...

Gall wasps are a small breed of wasps that lay their eggs in Oak and Pecan trees. Their eggs grow into the tree, leaving a hard capsule around it, which the larvae inside will eventually eat.

Mites, nematodes, bacteria, fungi or viruses can initiate gall formation, but insects are mostly to blame. When a female insect lays an egg inside plant tissue and the larva emerges from that egg ...

One species inserts its eggs into the galls (abnormal plant growths) on leaves, after which the larvae either feed on the plant material itself, or on the larvae of the insect that formed the gall.

These follow a similar lifestyle as the two-horned oak gall wasp, but they’re colonial, with dozens of wasp larvae sharing a single gall, and they’re laid in branch tissue, not leaves.