April 15, 2004 ~ Mystery Pods

Thursday.

I've seen them several times, now. Strange spherical bulges in dead oak leaves, usually about an inch and a half to two inches in diameter (approximately three to five centimeters).

The first time I found one, I broke it open out of curiosity. I was both intrigued and repulsed by the contents. Something wet spit out of it onto my hand. White fibers filled the inside chamber, seemingly soft and fuzzy but instead wet and sticky to the touch. Behind the white fibers was a small goopy brown mass. Lining one side were what looked like droppings or waste material.

I guessed that this was the home (nest?) of some sort of insect. An insect that burrows into living oak leaves (at least, so far, the ones that have still had the leaf attached were all oak), and somehow makes the leaf grow into a massive spherical bulge around the creature (parasite?).

The fibers inside certainly seemed like something an insect would make, and the pods that had fallen to the ground, upon closer inspection, always had a small hole in them that could have been an exit point.

I'm very curious, though, if anyone else has heard of this, or read of this. What sort of creature makes a leaf do this, grow out and bulge like this and then thicken and harden into a shell of sorts? How does it work?

Footnotes:

odds & ends: Morgan's leaving tomorrow afternoon for the weekend. Gonna be lonely at home.
weather: Lots of rain. A little snow, but it didn't really stick. Today was sunny and warm.
observation: The silly groundhog that always stays out to sniff at me when I walk down the street.
mail bag: The Writer magazine.
hours hiked this year: 60.25
hours volunteered this year: 81
listening: Billy Miller (flute).

online journals:

"As I pass through the check point, I feel that I have entered an unreal world. In the dead zone, the silence of the villages, roads, and woods seem to tell something at me....something that I strain to hear....something that attracts and repels me both at the same time. It is divinely eerie - like stepping into that Salvador Dali painting with the dripping clocks." ~ This isn't one of my normal reads, but Elena, the daughter of a nuclear physicist with clearance, posts pictures and descriptions of a motorcycle ride through Chernobyl, years after the nuclear meltdown of 1986.

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