Labyrinths

A little snow lies sifted over the ground and there's not much to see out there but these botanical doodles caught my interest and I collected a few of the leaves to photograph indoors.

The tunnels are created by leaf miners, the grubs of tiny moths that live their larval lives feeding on the sugary plant material between the external membranes of the leaves. As they eat their way through breakfast,  lunch and tea they create these characteristic squiggles which begin as a mere thread from the point where their mothers inserted an egg, and terminate in a lumpy sausage shape where the larvae break out of the larder, metamorphose into moths and fly off to reproduce and to start the process all over again. 

Different plants have different leaf miners, each species with its own particular signature. Since these are bramble leaves the insect involved is the Bramble Leaf Miner Moth which  can be seen here. It doesn't amount to much.