Last summer while hiking near Bald Hill we found a rose bush covered in strange mossy growths. I didn’t take a picture, but they looked like this:
Rose gall (photo from Wanderin' Weeta blog)
After some research, we learned that they were “mossy rose galls”, inhabited by the larvae of the Diplolepis rosae wasp:
John put the galls in a jar, and we forgot about them for four months. When John opened the jar today, imagine our surprise to find these beautiful creatures:
These are Jewel Wasps, Torymus bedeguaris, which parasitize the gall wasp larvae – meta-parasites! No gall wasps hatched out, either because they were all parasitized or (more likely) because they were more sensitive to dessication as the galls dried out.
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