What lives inside it

Ten years on

This guide exists because of an hour of audio recorded in a meadow outside Buffalo in September 2015, in which two people found three galls, failed to find a fourth, and said out loud, repeatedly, that they did not know. These are the things they left open, in their own words.

Quotations are transcribed from the recording and lightly punctuated. The recording does not label who is speaking, so none of them is attributed to one host or the other.

• answered since

  The two winters

  “He’ll hibernate over winter as an adult… and then the eggs overwinter.”They were working through the elliptical gall moth on air, could not reconcile their sources, and said so. What they landed on has two winters in it: the adult through one, the egg through the next. The literature describes a single year: adults emerge in late summer, lay in autumn, and the egg alone overwinters.15 They were right that the sources conflict, and right to distrust them.

• answered since

  The bunch gall’s hosts

  “Eastman says you can find bunch galls on many varieties… other sources just say Canada goldenrod, that’s it. So yeah, I don’t know — there’s some debate out there.”45There was. The revision settles it at three: S. altissima, S. canadensis and S. rugosa.5 One of the three has since become the hard case: R. capitata was reared from a single-chambered rosette gall on S. rugosa in 2024, so a bunch gall on rough-stemmed goldenrod can no longer be assigned to species by sight.304

• answered since

  The bunch gall’s life cycle

  “Unfortunately we don’t know a crazy ton about this one.”Their own show notes later carried most of it: two generations, a small spring gall preceding the conspicuous summer rosette.1 The rest is in the 2009 revision, including the winter: the larvae go down into the rhizomes, which the show notes also had right.5 See the entry.

• reclassified since

  Tall goldenrod and Canada goldenrod

  “The flower length goes with tall goldenrod, but the stem being smooth near the base, that goes with Canada goldenrod. What do we think?” — “I don’t know.”They were holding a plant that keyed both ways, and noted that tall goldenrod was by then being treated as a variety of Canada goldenrod. Flora of North America and Semple’s later work keep S. altissima and S. canadensis as separate species.48 The plant in their hands was genuinely ambiguous; the classification has since moved back under it.

• unverified

  The rough-stemmed goldenrod

  “It had a ball gall, and it should not have — if it’s a rough stem goldenrod.”A plant keyed to Solidago rugosa, carrying a ball gall it had no business carrying, and the conclusion drawn on air was that the plant must have been misidentified. Gallformers lists S. rugosa among the hosts of Eurosta solidaginis. The identification may well have been right the first time.
  
  But nobody has traced it to a source. That host record carries no citation in the database and the page is marked in progress. Until it is traced to Novak & Foote or to Abrahamson & Weis, it is a record, not a fact.243

• answered since

  The hormone paper

  “Back in 2002 there was a paper that came out… it turned out that this newer study reveals that no, they’re actually synthesizing it themselves.”The paper is Mapes & Davies, and it is 2001, not 2002; their own show notes have it right.110 They also had it slightly stronger than its authors did. It identified four cytokinins and found one of them at some fifty times stem concentration inside the larva; what it ruled out was accumulation from plant tissue, leaving synthesis as the inference. The word in the paper is “may”.10 Everything since has gone their way regardless; see the ball gall.

• still open

  The parasitoids

  “The parasitoids are not even that well documented. There’s a PhD project for somebody.”Still broadly true, and not only of the parasitoids. Fifty of the gall forms in this guide have no name at all.