Gall Fly Lab Report

The effects of where these larvae are laid can dictate the fate of these gall fly larvae. A study shows that avian predators can assess a gall 's content prior to pecking it open, preferring galls that are inhabited by gall fly larvae. Bird predation was found to be concentrated near the places with a lot of tree cover where S. gigantean a large centipede tends to pray few attacks occurred in the open where golden rods are prevalent. The study was a field experiment to observe the preference of avian predators on galls in different habitat types and that had different sizes, and heights of galls. It is possible that birds have either learned through experience or evolved through natural selection to choose the more profitable galls (Poff et al. 2002). This shows that the survival rates of the gall is not just dependent on the size but also on the distribution of the galls in different habitats. This can demonstrate a reason to why the means may have been closely related.

The separation in gall characteristic in the two biomes is due to different selection systems exerted by natural enemies of the gall fly. Each natural enemy used similar coevolution patterns this predicts that geographic variation in species interactions will lead to opposing selective pressures on interacting species, producing geographic variation in the traits of interacting species (Craig et al. 2007). This study reinforces the idea that gall fly characteristics have many different factors effecting them such as habitat, geography and the predators that they are more likely to encounter in each different biome. Also this shows that natural selection has different roles on the galls depending on the