Spined Turban Oak Gall!

I am in CHAOS (Cal Hiking And Outdoor Sports) and a Cal graduate, Anand Varma (look for him in the photo creds for bio/ National Geographic publications!), needed help finding the perfect example of a Spined Turban Oak Gall.
He needed a good picture for his research so he sent out an email blast to all CHAOS people, and I said I'd help look.

We went to Sunol Regional Wildnerness in SF and it's so beautiful there! Such a great place to hike/climb/boulder/jog/pitch a tent and have a picnic.
I honestly had no idea something this cool was so close to home.

This is a Spined Turban Oak Gall.
It forms when a wasp lays its eggs on valley oak leaves
and releases a chemical that makes the
tree grow a spiny, pink,
protective structure around the wasp's developing baby.

Just shows how I know nothing about anything.

Anyways I had a blast on this hike and will definitely be coming back to explore the Regional park more!

Along the way Anand taught all of us (a group of 10) about various nifty biological things! Some of which are in my photos/captions.  

Sheesh I have never even thought to look under the leaves of these oak trees and it blows my mind how these bizarre spikey pink things just grow there. Casually.

This was another type of gall (protective
structure for a wasp baby).
It was dehydrated because it fell on the ground and thus
couldn't get nutrients from the tree anymore. Inside you
can see the dead wasp baby.

One guy on the hike with us brought coffee grounds and a
bunsen burner type coffee maker. Then he just randomly
started cooking coffee. It was spiced Turkish coffee. A
delicious (and random) surprise!

These marks in the tree are made by a Yellow-Bellied Sap
Sucker (a type of woodpecker). The woodpecker will
make these carvings in the trees, wait for the sap to bleed
out, and then fly back to eat the sap and all of the bug that
got caught in it. Brilliant.

This is a Western Fence Lizard. It has this tiny little flap
right behind it's ears that serves no purpose other than a
home for ticks. No one knows why that flap is there but
some theorize that it's to help keep the concentration of
ticks in one place (instead of having them all over the
lizard's body, it's just on the random flap).

ALSO. SUPER COOL. The type of tick that carries lyme
disease likes these lizards but there is something in the
blood of the lizards that actually kills the lyme disease in
the tick. So the tick can suck blood and then leave to find
it's next victim, but it's no longer infected with lyme
disease!

Unidentifiable bug. Cockroach/cricket?

Random fruit we saw and cracked open.
Not sure what it was, didn't risk eating it.

Afterwards we all went to Saturn's for dinner!

Bloggin' Again!

My fav library (Morrison) at Cal

My friend from Australia, Aaron, is coming to visit America and I started looking up things to do here.

(currently addicted to roadtrippers.com)

And I realized how much of an idiot I was.
MY GOD AMERICA IS SO BEAUTIFUL.
It's so easy to take what you have for granted.
So I decided to make a blog about my travels through (mostly) the Bay Area, California and the rest of the States. :)
Most of the cool stuff will come around winter break when I have many a roadtrip planned, but I figured I might as well start blogging about the little, and awesome, things now :)

Like Berkeley.
(Where I go to school)
Berkeley is so freakin' cool.

Casual Kendo on the streets of Berkeley

Being away in South East Asia all summer and coming back has just opened up my eyes to so many things, one of which being the fact that there is beauty in almost everything. Even right outside of your window.

So yeah. I am going to be a tourist of my own home.
Because why not. 









Btw: my Asia blog -> valeriayermakova-asia.blogspot.com