Cynipini and Associates Larval Sequencing Pilot Study

We have an exciting opportunity coming up in the world of oak gall research!

TL;DR: we're looking for volunteers to collect oak wasp galls, put them in a sealed container, label them clearly and carefully, and mail them within 2-3 days to:

Andrew Forbes
The University of Iowa
434A Biology Building
Iowa City, IA 52242

Long version:

If you’ve posted many gall observations by now, there’s a good chance I’ve asked you to return to a site to collect a gall and rear adults. Rearing adults of the inducing wasp is important because it’s the only way taxonomists can describe an unknown species. We’ve had a remarkable amount of success with this so far, and I was able to bring dozens of specimens reared by iNat users to taxonomists this July at the International Gall Symposium thanks to those efforts.

But if you’ve been involved in this process, you know that rearing has a ton of failure points. You might not know the gall is worth collecting until you leave the site. You don’t know when the gall will be mature enough to viably collect. The gall could mold or dry out or you might rear parasitoids or inquilines instead of the inducer.

For this new project, we don’t have to worry about any of that. The goal is to study the whole community at each point in time using genetic sequencing of larvae. We’re trying to determine when different species show up in galls and which species of parasitoid and inquiline are associated with which inducers. In other words, no more waiting and no need to rear (we will still want to rear plenty of things but galls collected too early or too late to rear inducers are now valuable too).

We are currently working on a grant proposal that will get us some funds to support this work in the lab and in the field for the next few years. This fall, we’re conducting a pilot study to find issues and opportunities in the workflow we hope to expand in the grant. Here’s what we’d like you to do, starting now and extending into Gall Week (9/2-10) and beyond.

Collect oak galls and place them in a sealed container so they don’t dry out (ziploc bags work, or a plastic condiment cup with a lid). If the gall is detachable you can remove it from the plant; if it’s integral, you can either put the whole leaf or host tissue or cut as needed to fit in your container. Ideally each container should contain only one gall species, but multiple galls of a species can go together if they share a host, date, and location.
Label each distinct collection with the following information:
iNat observation number
Host tree species
Location (including lat/long)
Date of collection
Collector name

Within 2-3 days of collection, place them in a padded envelope or small box and mail them to this address
Andrew Forbes
The University of Iowa
434A Biology Building
Iowa City, IA 52242

If you can’t get the galls mailed out in a short timeframe and are confident/curious to try it, you can also dissect the larvae out yourself and put them in 0.5-2 mL vials (eg) of 95% ethanol and store them in the freezer. If there are people who are willing to consolidate collections and do this dissection in bulk, let me know and we can mail vials prefilled with ethanol to you.

DO NOT put dry galls in the freezer--this will destroy the larvae and make it impossible to preserve them for shipment. It may be possible to keep the fresh galls in the fridge to keep the larvae alive longer to consolidate a larger shipment collected over several days, but we haven’t experimented with this. It would be valuable if someone wanted to try it.

It’s your responsibility to make sure that you collect only where it is legally permissible to do so--make sure you avoid collecting in National Parks or similar locations. Most municipal parks should be fine but it’s always good to double check. Use your judgment in terms of collection effort, but generally speaking your ability to affect populations of these insects is negligible.

If anyone is planning to organize any events for Gall Week, you could consolidate collections and make a single shipment from your area, which would save a lot of money overall. Broadly speaking, if you are going to make a shipment, it would make sense to try to collect enough galls of enough species to make it worth the postage.

In terms of priorities: I’ve made a few posts in the past about things I’m especially interested in, but really there are just too many species and generations to list. Anything listed as “Undescribed” on gallformers.org is a top priority and we can’t get too many. A few of the most common species (all the Belonocnema species, Bassettia pallida, and Druon quercuslanigerum on live oak, Amphibolips confluenta and Philonix fulvicollis in the eastern US) are no longer needed, but many other very abundant galls are still of interest. Generally speaking, err on the side of assuming that something is worth collecting, unless you have a specific plan to do something else with it later.

I’m unfortunately not going to have a ton of time to guide everyone on this individually, so I’m hoping that this project provides the space for new and existing members of the wonderful gall community to take initiative on their own and to support each other. That said, feel free to tag me or message me with questions and I’ll try to help.

You can also tag Dr Forbes at @aforbes10 or contanct him by email at andrew-forbes@uiowa.edu or tag Guerin Brown at @moneykittens. They'll be the ones receiving and processing your specimens.

Posted on August 19, 2023 05:59 AM by megachile