What are the balls on the back of oak leaves?

The fluffy balls attached to oak leaves is wooly oak gall. Tiny insects infest some of the oak leaves in the spring and cause the leaves to grow the fuzzy tan galls on their undersides. The insects live and feed inside the galls during the summer.

What does pin oak leaves look like?

The leaves are dark green on the upper surface, and paler below with tufts of pale hairs in the axils of the veins. The twigs are slender, smooth, green to red brown in color. Buds are 1/8 inch long, red-brown, shiny, sharp-pointed, and angled.

What are the little fuzzy things on oak leaves?

The fuzzy gall on oak leaves is a woolly oak leaf gall. They can be as large as three-fourths of an inch and are often bright pink or yellow, fading to brown in the fall. It is created by the cynipid wasp, also called a gallfly, and don’t sting humans.

What comes out of an oak gall?

Biology and Symptoms: Galls are made of plant tissue and form when an insect secretes a chemical that causes interference with normal plant cell growth. Adults lay eggs in expanding tree buds and leaves in the spring. The larvae then feed, pupate and emerge from the gall as adult wasps.

How many lobes does an oak leaf have?

The characteristic features in an oak leaf are its lobes and sinuses (space between the lobes). The number of lobes may be from 5 up to 20 in a leaf. The leaves may have a lobed margin, or a smooth margin in the entire leaf. Some leaves are serrated or toothed with smooth margin.

Why are oak leaves that shape?

Even on a single tree, you can find leaves of widely differing shapes. One reason for this is that the amount of sunlight that reaches them affects their shape. Leaves that are shaded are not only often larger than those that are bathed in sunshine, but their lobes are far more shallow.

How do you tell the difference between pin oak and red oak?

You can tell pin oaks from other red oaks by their downward-sloping lower branches. Pin oaks are very similar to scarlet oaks, but their buds are hairless, and in the wild, they typically grow many small, “pin-like” branches. Their bark is dark and furrowed, and their wood is good for splitting and burning.

Which is stronger ash or oak?

Although both Oak and Ash belong to the same category as hardwoods, they differ in the degree of hardness. For instance, Ash is considered harder than Oak and as a result is used as materials in heavy constructions requiring strong and durable materials.

How do you tell white oak from red oak?

White oak vs red oak tree in nature Red oak varieties usually have pointed tips on their jagged leaves, as well as a smoother appearance to their bark. In contrast, a white oak’s more bulbous leaf will be rounded at the tips, and the bark will have deep grooves, giving it a much more textured appearance.

What is oak leaf gall?

Oak galls are abnormal plant growths found on foliage and twigs that are produced by small oak gall wasps. Shapes of galls vary from spherical to urn-shaped to star-shaped to fuzzy. Inside the galls are the eggs and larvae of the insects.

What are the stringy things that fall from oak trees?

These stringy brown tassels are called catkins or tassels. They are the male pollen structures produced by oak trees (Quercus spp.). They hang in the trees like tassels on the end of bike handlebars, releasing their pollen into the wind to fertilize the female flowers.