Sputnik?

On the first day of autumn Ollie dog ate three windfall apples with relish, a Cox's Orange Pippin and two very tart crabs.

We went bug hunting and while I was looking carefully for life on a dog rose bush I noticed the above on one of the hips. I think it might be a sputnik gall. I've seen these on the underside of wild rose leaves but never before on a hip. They're formed by the cynipid wasp Diplolepsis nervosa and are a nursery chamber for the grub. I've read that Michael Chinery dubbed them sputnik galls. I have his Field Guide to the Insects of Britain and Northern Europe which I used for reference before the Internet. So sad that I don't use my books these days. I remember scanning the skies in the late fifties with my father looking for Sputnik.

While I was researching this I read that Alfred Kinsey was an expert entomologist who specialised in gall wasps before he got into sexology. Down that rabbit hole I learnt that the well-known symbol used for female in science is the mirror of Venus. Bit uneasy about the vanity aspect.      

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