Earlier this month my colleague, LyAnn Graff, brought in an interesting looking fuzz ball surrounding a thin leafy branch of a burr oak tree. It was about the size of a golf ball, but with red-tipped ...

When you look up into the bare branches of some oak trees at this time of year, you can see ball-shaped growths hanging there, looking almost like nature’s Christmas ornaments. These are galls. A gall ...

Plenty of animals build their homes in oak trees. But some very teeny, tricky insects make the tree do all the work. “What nerve!” you might say. What … gall! And you’d be right. Oak galls are caused ...

Many coast live oak (Quercus agrifolia) trees are showing unusual browning in their canopies in the last month or two. If you look carefully, you may see small, crescent-shaped galls forming on the ...

Walk through an oak stand in late summer or fall, and you’ll spot leaves dotted with neat little spheres, also known as galls ...

Q: The oaks in our neighborhood have some type of gall or insect egg case under each leaf. It is about the size of a pencil eraser and is fuzzy tan. Should we be concerned? - B.S., Houston A: It ...

Galls are growths on leaves, stems, branches, trunks, and roots caused by various agents. But they are usually induced by either insects or a fungus of some sort. The exact manner in which insect ...

Hundreds of species of small wasps called gall wasps live in the forests of North America. Hundreds more species of them are spread worldwide. In Southeast Missouri oak trees are a favorite host plant ...

Dear Reader: These are galls that have resulted from the stings of the tree tissue by a small wasp as she lays her eggs in the current season’s growth. Oaks are host plants to scores of different ...

Oak gall wasps and their predators don’t have the panache of butterflies, but they’re attracting growing interest among both scientists and naturalists. Only 1 to 8 millimeters long, these small ...

County’s 10 oak species produce odd-shaped ‘nests’ that house and feed wasp larvae. One foolproof hiking strategy to keep young spirits up and prevent the “are we there yet?” syndrome is to turn your ...

When you look up into the bare branches of some oak trees at this time of year, you can see ball-shaped growths hanging there, looking almost like nature’s Christmas ornaments. These are galls. A gall ...