joyceg's Identifications

These root galls were found at the base of an oak just beneath the soil level (near where the moss can be seen in the last image)...on a rainy field day w/ Joyce Gross & Alice Abela near Laguna Mountain. On a lark, after mentioning oak root galls to us, Joyce used her intuition to choose a spot at the base of an oak (a coast or interior live oak, Q. agrifolia or Q. wislizeni ?)...and after some nimble excavating exposed what she recognized as signs of the galls (I think she cued-in on the reddish area [red arrow] in last photo...though the brown lumps [pink arrows] seem more the right shape for the galls).

There were a large number of the galls, and opening some revealed diapausing adults within. I believe there was a single cynipid adult per gall, as mentioned for Callirhytis apicalis under "Additional information" at the bottom of Joyce's web page here (although Russo(2021) indicates on pg. 87 that C. apicalis is polythalamous...perhaps it can sometimes have more than one individual per gall?).

Alice also has photos from the same "batch" here, and Joyce has photos of C. apicalis from Alameda County here. Alice & Joyce's photos are fantastic...I'm just adding these in case they may provide views of additional characters of potential interest.