The Urban Pantheist

The plant is a black cherry Prunus serotina, a weedy little tree found throughout the New World. The leaf bears the mushroom-like galls of a tiny arachnid, the mite Eriophyes cerasicrumena. The animals are living inside the protuberance.

The white discoloration patterns on the leaf are feeding marks left by leafhoppers--small (but enormous compared to the mites) insects that puncture the leaf and feed on the fluid within.

Thanks always to Charley Eiseman, who expertly divines animals from the marks they make on plants. He rears galls to identify the adult insects--I think he has discovered new or locally unknown species doing this.

For really great photos of candy-stripe leafhoppers, Graphocephala coccinea*, see here (BUG SEX WARNING). These adorable little pests use their adorable little beaks to suck juices out of plants--I think they're doing lots of adorable damage to our raspberries. These hoppers are part of the group called "sharpshooters," subfamily Cicadellinae.** Like their smaller, less hoppy relatives the aphids, they excrete excess fluid from their plant-sucking lifestyle. Unlike aphids, which slowly emit the stuff as payment in an ant-mafia protection racket, sharpshooters explosively fire droplets of liquid from their abdomen. Pew pew!

* "written-on-head, red like a berry"

** "Little cicada subfamily"