Gall Week Spring 2023 event

Our two previous Gall Week events took place in the fall, documenting mostly fall-generation galls. This time, we'll try to focus on the elusive spring galls. Many gall Wasps, for example, have two alternate generations. Their spring galls are home to the bisexual generation, therefore include both male and female wasps inside. The larvae develop quickly, pupate, and the adults hatch, meet, and mate, and finish their life cycle. Let's try and document as many as we can - there are still many new species waiting to be discovered! 

Gall Week events: 

• Make observations between 4/15-4/23, and add them manually to our iNaturalist project Gall Week Spring 2023. 
• Spring Baylands BioBlitz - 4/15/2023, from 9-11 am. We will document galls and gulls :) Info here. 

How to get started? 

You can look for specific host plants, specific groups of gall inducers, or anything you find interesting. If you've never done this before, you can check what are the best host plants in your area. You can use gall or insect books from your area, websites (such as Gallformers.org), and iNat. We highly recommend listening to an interview of gall expert Adam Kranz on the podcast Natures Archive, and a shorter episode about Gall Week 2021 and the latest episodeabout spring galls here. You can also look at our Gall Week 2021 project, with over 6,500 observations from around the world, and our Gall Week 2022 project, with close to 8K observations! Another good way to start is to look at one of the gall projects and see what other people found in your area:

• Galls of California - https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/galls-of-california and many other local projects
• Galls of North America - https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/galls-of-north-america https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/north-american-galls
• Leaf and plant galls - https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/leaf-and-plant-galls
• Galls of the Eastern United States - https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/galls-of-the-eastern-united-states

You can download fliers for some of the common Bay Area galls on our main page here.