Hi Everyone,

Another Gall Week is on its way! I am placing tags from past participants on this page. Feel free to tag others in the comments. Remember to join the project so you can get updates on journal posts! https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/gall-week-september-2023

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Hi (North American) gall hunters!

Every year for gall week, you all go out and find a ton of interesting galls, including many undescribed and understudied species. Most of the time, there's no easy path to making scientific use of those specimens. This year, we have an opportunity to make use of a large proportion of what you might find. Gallformers.org is partnering with the Forbes Lab at the University of Iowa and the Prior Lab at Binghamton University on a grant to study the oak gall wasp community in North America. This fall we're hoping to conduct a pilot study to test the procedure we hope to use over the next few years. The goal of the study is to barcode sequence all of the inducer, inquiline, and parasitoid larvae present in oak galls over the course of their development, so any gall inhabitant and any developmental stage is valuable.

If you're interested in participating, you can start collecting immediately--you don't need to wait for gall week. In fact, we're hoping to spread the arrivals out across the season. Feel free to get started now or wait until after gall week, whatever suits your schedule.

What we're asking you to do is this:

Find oak wasp (cynipini) galls on oaks and document them (and their host oak) on iNat

Collect galls and put them in a sealed container (ziploc, plastic cup with lid, etc)

Label each collection with its iNat record, collector name, collection date, location, and host tree species

Within 2-3 days of collection, mail to the Forbes lab:

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

In the interest of economizing on postage, it would be ideal to send fewer packages with more galls instead of many packages with fewer galls. We don't have funds to pay for shipping this year (that would be part of the grant, if we get it), so it will be up to you to decide how you want to approach that. Just know that if you wait too long, the larvae we're looking for may not arrive intact.

If you're planning to host a gall week event, we'd love to have you consolidate a shipment of collections made by participants before and during that event.

If you want to make collections over a longer period and not mail them immediately, you are also welcome to dissect the galls yourself and preserve any larvae you find in 95% ethanol and store them in your freezer until shipment. We can potentially send you vials already filled with ethanol if you are interested in doing this. As always, just make sure they are clearly labelled.

DO NOT freeze galls or larvae dry; this will kill them and make it impossible to ship them intact.

As always, 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 you have questions, you can reply here, or tag Dr Forbes at @aforbes10 or contact him by email at andrew-forbes@uiowa.edu or tag Guerin Brown at @moneykittens. They'll be the ones receiving and processing your specimens. More info is available here: https://www.inaturalist.org/journal/megachile/83377-cynipini-and-associates-larval-sequencing-pilot-study

If you have any feedback about this procedure in advance or as you put it into action, please let us know. Working out the kinks of this process is our main goal this year.

Thank you all--looking forward to seeing what you all find!

If you’re ever curious about annotations/fields we’ve been adding to your gall observations, here’s why.

@megachile created an app called “the phenology tool”. The tool allows you to browse a growing database of gall inducer collection and emergence dates. It also uses that data to calculate predicted date ranges for collection and emergence at your latitude. If you want to try rearing an adult from a gall, the tool will use existing published dates to predict when you should look. This tool visualizes the info available for each species and extrapolates to predict the timing at other latitudes.

What makes this tool possible? Besides published records from academic papers, the majority of data has been imported from iNat observations (yes, likely yours!). But without these annotations/fields correctly filled, your precious data will not function in this app.

So, if you are an experienced iNat observer/identifier who’s already familiar with annotations/observation fields, feel free to add them for yourself or others by following this guide. You can opt to fill out what you’re sure of, and always leave them blank when in doubt (I do that all the time). It’s actually better to be blank than wrong, so we don’t end up spending more time correcting each other’s fields. And even without any fields, your ID help on common species would still be very helpful!

If you are a new participant or just a casual observer who doesn't feel comfortable with adding them, don’t worry at all!! As @merav wrote in “About” section, try your best to fill “Host” and “Host Plant ID” fields, and the easiest thing anyone can do is just to turn on “Evidence of Presence: Gall” annotation. If you like observing galls, let’s start practicing from there!

And if you have any questions about these fields, feel free to comment below or message/tag me. I’m actually not a tech savvy person and still new to this process, but I’ll try my best to answer!

PS: If you have your observation fields locked for only curators or yourself, please reconsider opening it to the public (unless you have a strong reason) so your valuable data will also be a contribution to science!