Oregon Hikers

Saw this in Badger Creek Wilderness this week - beautiful color, but appeared rather taxing to the vine maples it was growing on. Some kind of smut or ??

vine maple smut? by walrus walrus, on Flickr

The red patches are erineum galls from baby mites.

And this is Douglas maple, not vine maple. In fact, the gall presence is one way to pick out a Douglas maple in the woods as they are not terribly obvious plants.

I've only noticed the galls on Douglas maple, on which species they are common. You can't see the mites themselves - they're too tiny.

Velvet Gall.
https://btweenblinks.wordpress.com/2012 ... eum-galls/

Neat. Never would have guessed, thanks!

walrus wrote: ↑

June 30th, 2018, 6:45 pm

Neat. Never would have guessed, thanks!

I would not have guessed, either. I first thought it was some fungus at first.

As a non-native but still advanced English speaker, I didn't know that the word "smut" could apply to small infections/lesions on tree leaves, I thought that this was a joke thread in which the original poster asked whether that old issue of Playboy he found in the woods was the real deal or not


... and of course, I clicked the link to the thread...