Identifier Profile: Gallformers

This is the eighteenth entry in an ongoing monthly (or almost monthly!) series profiling the amazing identifiers of iNaturalist.

Gall Week September 2023 runs from September 2nd to September 10th (gall observations from anywhere in the world are accepted), so I thought I’d feature a few of the folks involved with the creation of Gallformers.org, a website that is “The place to identify and learn about galls on plants in the US and Canada,” and was started by people who met through iNat and contribute a lot of gall identifications and information to gall observations made in that region! 

Plant galls are, according to Gallformers:

Abnormal growths of plant tissues, similar to tumors or warts in animals, that have an external cause--such as an insect, mite, nematode, virus, fungus, bacterium, or even another plant species…Plant galls are often complex structures that allow the insect or mite that caused the gall to be identified even if that insect or mite is not visible.

These structures are bizarre, beautiful, and sometimes barely noticeable, but they’re always fun to find and post to iNat - at least I think so. I encourage everyone to look for them the next time they’re out iNatting.

Below is an “oral history” from five people who were part of creating Gallformers. It’s cool to hear how they met on iNat and collaborated to create an excellent resource that’s its own entity and also using iNat data. And while Gallformers’ focus is on the United States and Canada, I think that it, like the Fly Guide, is a great model for how identification resources can be made for any taxa and region.

Finally, I kept this piece to five people for simplicity’s sake, but there are many, many people who’ve helped grow the gall community on iNaturalist, so I want to emphasize that. 

The people you’ll hear from below are:

Jeff Clark (@jeffdc): Gallformers co-founder and coder, based in the Washington, D.C area

Timothy Frey (@calconey): a Postdoctoral researcher studying microbial communities associated with crop rotation, cover crops, and soil health characteristics at the Ohio State University, based in the Ag Campus in Wooster, Ohio

Noriko Ito (@norikonbu): amateur naturalist and Gallformers volunteer, based in the San Francisco Bay Area

Adam Kranz (@megachile): the director of Gallformers and a private school math and science teacher based in Austin, Texas

Kimberlie Sasan (@kimberlietx): an Herbarium & Research Assistant at the Botanical Research Institute of Texas, FWBG|BRIT 

(Some quotes have been lightly edited and I’ve tried to arrange them in a way that flows well, narratively.)

Adam: When I first became interested in galls in 2018, I was living in Detroit, Michigan and working as an in-home private tutor. My work took me all over the Detroit suburbs and I often had awkward periods of time between sessions, so I spent a lot of time visiting little parks. At first, I made it my goal to learn as many local taxa as I could and identify them on iNat. This was a dream of mine for many years, and I had a big backlog of photos I'd never been able to identify for lack of expert guidance. iNat’s computer vision and social network suddenly made all of that possible.

Kimberlie: I've been a big fan of iNat for many years now and I often find myself going from one rabbit hole to another, as my journal posts will show.  In one such post in December 2019 I documented the various wooly galls of Texas because I couldn't find anyone who knew anything about them. I had also created a project for DFW Galls to help me see their diversity and begin to recognize differences in morphology. Over time, I met some other iNat folks interested in galls and we started to talk more and more about how to ID them. Once I tapped into the Biodiversity Heritage Library and found the original gall descriptions, the flood gates opened wide. 

Timothy: I got interested in galls during my undergrad when I took a class called Field and Woodland Fungi, which randomly had a lecture on galls. The biology was briefly explained in the class (hijacking plant cells for their own benefit) and I was fascinated. The class also included lots of pictures and I was struck by the incredible phenotypic diversity. This fascination with galls influenced my decision of which lab I chose for grad school and I chose to work in the lab of Chris Taylor on a gall-forming nematode, Meloidogyne incognita (Root-knot Nematode). My Ph.D. work focused on how it uses host chemical cues to locate a host root.  

I found out about iNat in 2019 as I was finishing up grad school, an intern of mine that summer suggested I check out the app. I was initially skeptical as other plant ID apps that I had tried had been quite lackluster, but I found the iNat computer vision actually worked pretty well, and I loved the distribution maps that the app makes. 

Noriko: Born and raised in Tokyo, I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in the mid 90’s and have spent much of my adult life here. I always liked nature and taking random photos but was not good at organizing them. I joined iNat in early 2020 when the pandemic started, so it wasn’t too long ago. Like many people during that time, I was desperately longing for something to do outside. I never liked any form of social media so I was a bit skeptical about sharing anything online in the beginning, but now I’m glad my positive experiences have been confirmed when the New York Times’ “The Nicest Place Online?” article came out. I found iNat was a good way to catalog what/where I’ve seen, otherwise I’d forget. I started out with spring wildflowers which had been my primary interest, then got into mushrooms when not much else was to be observed in the California winter, but didn’t discover galls until the summer of 2021.

Adam: The thing that kept me hooked was that there were so many easily filled gaps. If I could just upload a few dozen observations of a common local species, its ID would be automated forever. Because the site was growing rapidly at that point, the sooner we got those training observations collected, the more the computer vision model could help us stay on top of the flood of new ones. 

Of course, for that to be worth doing it had to be done right, which meant focusing on groups with accessible visual ID traits backed up by reliable scientific sources. I gravitated to things that were smaller and weirder, and started collecting resources for any groups that seemed accessible for me and set myself the task of identifying those observations in Michigan and nearby states. One of the most exciting resources I found in that process was @ceiseman's book Tracks & Signs of Insects and Other Invertebrates. That book had a brief chapter that just dipped into galls, so for the first year or so I worked on galls alongside leafminers and eggs and rust fungi and aphids and slugs and all sorts of other things. Whenever I found something I couldn't find in the book, I would tag Charley on iNat and he would try to answer from the resources he'd collected. Eventually he emailed me a copy of Weld's 1959 catalog Cynipid galls of the Eastern United States, and I started a little spreadsheet to keep track of everything I found there and in other sources. From there, I expanded my focus to all gall inducing taxa in North America.

Jeff: Not long after I found iNaturalist (Spring 2020) I was walking around in some local woods when I found a couple of oak galls. I knew what they were but as it turns out I knew hardly anything and there was so much to learn. I took photos of these galls and uploaded them to iNat. They were identified to species and my interest was piqued. 

Noriko: It was a bit of a shock when I realized that I didn’t know anything about galls because by that time, I thought I knew most things in nature pretty well. So I started looking them up and came across Ron Russo’s article called “Confession of a Gall Hunter” [PDF]. He explained beautifully how he got into it, and I was mesmerized. Soon after I started posting my gall observations on iNat, I found a project called Galls of California. “Is there a such thing?” I thought. “I wasn’t the only weirdo fascinated by this???” 

I joined the project in August 2021, bought Russo’s newly published book Plant Galls of the Western United States and read it cover to cover. Through the Galls of California project, I’ve learned so much from experienced gall observers/identifiers such as @nancyasquith, @garth_harwood, @merav, @leslie_flint, @graysquirrel (this list goes on)… and of course, Adam Kranz.

Kimberlie: By May 2020 Adam had created his first iNat guide on Fuzzy Oak Galls.  We were furiously messaging back and forth about all the species we could find information about. I was also learning more about how to photograph the galls to get a better identification.  Many of the taxon images for Celticecis sp came about from my experiments with cross sections and light boxes.

Timothy: I had been somewhat casually tracking gall incidence in my area for a few years prior and decided to upload a few galls to the app (and a few that I could not find an ID for on my own), this is where I first ran into Adam, who was the biggest gall identifier at the time. I quickly figured out that this was a place where my interest, curiosity, and passion could be put to use by helping to ID these interactions/organisms. I devoured most of the readily available gall literature (Weld’s cynipid books and Gagne’s midge book and papers), so that I could become more adept at IDing galls on the platform.

Jeff: Most of the gall literature was either PDF scans of old journal articles or books that were difficult or very expensive to obtain. This got me thinking about ways to improve the situation via technology. Almost at this exact same time Adam reached out on the iNat forums asking if anyone was interested in helping him build an ID tool and database for galls. Next thing I knew, I was building out Gallformers.org. I wrote and maintain the code and infrastructure for the site.

Adam: It quickly became clear that gall ID traits lent themselves extremely well to a non-dichotomous key format. Once the vision for that tool had planted itself in my mind, it became a minor obsession to make it a reality. I started posting about it on the iNat forum, first asking if the site's developers could help me expand the existing Guides feature, then asking for other existing platforms it could be built on and collaborators to do that building, and finally for collaborators to build it from scratch. I eventually got tremendously lucky and received a reply from Jeff Clark, a web developer who was then on sabbatical between jobs, had exactly the skill set we needed, and was one of a few users who had become excited about galls because I was interacting eagerly with their gall observations. He built the site in late 2020 and we've now been operating since 2021. 

I put a big push in to finish the oak gall wasp portion of our database over the summer of 2021, and in the process became personally obsessed with their taxonomy and biology. Fortunately, once the site existed, it attracted a lot of new and existing gall enthusiasts who took up responsibility for adding data on many other gall-inducing taxa.

Kimberlie: While Adam and Jeff were connecting and brainstorming about Gallformers.org I was collecting, rearing, and photographing as many oak galls as I could find.  It gave us some great photos for the website, and I learned a lot about rearing galls first-hand which I could share with others who were also new to learning about galls. Gallformers.org has been a great community and I'm thrilled to watch it take off like it has!

Noriko: About a year later, in the fall of 2022, Adam invited me to join Gallformers.org, probably because I was pestering him and other Gallformers admins too much about updating their website. I felt flattered but was going to decline his invitation because I didn’t think I could contribute much. I was (and still am) just an amateur naturalist without any academic/scientific background in this field. But he wrote back, “There are no commitments involved.” So I decided to give it a try.

After joining Gallformers, I started helping Adam with some tedious data entry for the phenology tool that he was developing (I’ve just written a little bit about it here). In the early months of this year, we started planning the first Spring Gall Week with @merav, and @naturesarchive produced a wonderful podcast interview with Adam about it. This was the first event where I actively started making IDs on other people’s gall observations.

Adam: I've shifted my focus from building the website to collaborating with scientists to study oak gall wasps. A lot of my engagement with iNat now is to encourage people to collect and rear undescribed and understudied wasps for description and sequencing projects. To calibrate the timings for those collections, one of my big projects has been to accumulate a database of gall phenology data and share it using a web interface. I recently built a web extension that dramatically reduces the friction in adding observation field values to observations, which is necessary for collecting that data from iNat.

Jeff: As for the identification of galls, I tend to stick to the Cynipids, but these days I end up identifying tons of Eastern North American Oaks as well. I use Gallformers to help, much better than my faulty memory! After knowing Adam only virtually for 2+ years we finally had the chance to meet this past July when I was in Austin on a business trip (see the photo). Besides meeting Adam and a bunch of other great people via iNat, I also met the love of my life (@izafarr) via iNat!

Kimberlie: In October 2020, the year of the Gallformers boom, local botanist Bob O'Kennon (@bob777) invited me to see a gall he had found that I didn't recognize from the literature. It turned out to be an undescribed species, and with the help of Miles Zhang (@mileszhang), we published it in July 2022 as a new species, Druon laceyi. 

Adam: All of that work paid off this summer when I had the chance to go to the 8th International Plant Gall Symposium in Chico, California. I brought something like 60 undescribed wasp collections to send back to taxonomists in Australia, Hungary, and Spain. But the coolest part of that conference was that almost every presentation about North American gall inducers included photos by Gallformers contributors on iNat and acknowledgements for us at the end. It was really satisfying to see that our work was paying off in connecting the amateur and scientific communities in such a mutually rewarding way.

Noriko: After Adam returned from the 8th International Plant Gall Symposium, he is now full of new ideas/projects and busier than ever, so I hope to continue helping anyway I can, and am excited to see where Gallformers is headed.

I consider Adam and Nancy as my mentors because they really took me under their wings and taught me with patience. Without their support, I don’t think I’m here today. And thanks to iNat and Gallformers, I’m meeting many interesting people: other iNatters who invite me to go hiking together because they also think what I see is “cool”. Oak experts who comment on my hybrid oak observations and share their knowledge and passionate discussions. Top researchers who ask me to send specimens and let me know what they found about them. Who’d have thought I could find a community that I feel proud to be a part of, through these anomalies called… “galls”!

Gall tips and resources:

Noriko recommends @nancyasquith’s resources here, which focus on North American galls but also includes resources/info for galls in general. 

From Timothy

Galls can be found anywhere, this is one of the things that I find appealing about them – rest areas, edges of parking lots, cemeteries and other forgotten spaces usually contain galls, you will be surprised by how many you can find in your backyard.

1. Consider that galls have evolved with their host plants – this means that you are much more likely to find galls (population # and diversity) on native plants rather than exotic plants (although they often contain some gall species that have traveled with them as well). A site with a large diversity of native plants is likely to have the largest diversity of galls.
2. Consider a site where trees have branches that are accessible to you without having to climb – parks, cemeteries, forests along roads or other edges are easier to find galls in compared to an open forest which may have few accessible leaves.
3. Consider a site with a grassland component – in addition to having trees with more accessible limbs, many grassland plants also have quite a lot of gall diversity (ex: goldenrods and other Asteraceae here in the Midwest US)
4. Take the time to turn over leaves, many species only occur on the bottom surface of leaves and may not be noticeable before looking at the underside.
5. Many gall-forming organisms are carried at least short distances with prevailing winds and I have found that edges of woods that have an area that is exposed to prevailing winds often have a high gall density (usually western or southern edges here in NE Ohio.).
6. Galls are seasonal – you may find different species on the same plants at different times of the year (particularly true of the Oak Gall Wasps). There are often different species present in spring than are present during summer and fall. In general late summer (August/September here in NE Ohio) seems to have the greatest density of species.

The most important thing to ID galls is to “Know thy host” – Can you ID the host? If so, ID as narrowly as possible, galls are often fairly host-specific.

1. I recommend the following shots of a gall for it to get identified on iNat: 
2. Upper surface 
3. Lower surface (even if there appears to be nothing there) 
4. A wider shot with context (leaf, stem etc that the gall is on, ideally with the gall itself still visible), this shot is missed frequently but is extremely helpful in confusing cases. 
5. Further pictures of the host and gall if the ID of the host is uncertain. 
6. A photo of the cross-section.

Photos, from top to bottom:Spiny Leaf Gall Wasp (Diplolepis polita) by @mileszhang, Adam Kranz (left) and Jeff Clark (right), Timothy Frey, Noriko Ito, Kimberlie Sasan, Adam Kranz (center) with other researchers at the 8th International Plant Gall Symposium.

Posted on September 1, 2023 07:54 PM by tiwane