Dasineura urticae galls on a nettle leaf

I am an amateur naturalist trying to learn something about everything living in my garden.

I've previously blogged the nettles (Dioica urticae) growing in my garden (indeed, I guess some of you reading this may even now be tucked up in your nettle bed sheets!) and also described some of the capsid bugs (Liocoris tripustulatis) I found living on them.

Recently I've noticed evidence of a second lifeform feeding off my nettles, namely the galls in photo 1.

I am fortunate enough to be in possession of a set of a dozen-or-so volumes of Field Studies, a journal that was at one time published by the Field Studies Council. This admirable UK charity runs a wide range of residential study courses aimed at the amateur naturalist. The Field Studies journal is no longer printed which is a pity as it commonly used to feature keys for the amateur wanting to identify some of the trickier plants and animal in our fields and gardens, including (for present purposes) a key to British Plant Galls by Redfern, Shirley and Bloxham in the October 2002 issue. Fortunately, for those of you without old copies of the journal to hand, this key has been reprinted. You can purchase a copy along with various other gall guides from the British Plant Gall society here.

Redfern, Shirely and Bloxham list five arthropods and one fungal rust capable of causing galls on British nettles. The pouch-like swellings with slit-like grooves in their surfaces on the leaf in photo 1 indicate these are galls caused by the small fly, Dasineura urticae. Had I cut open some of the galls (I didn't) I might have been lucky enough to find some of the white grubs of this fly. Indeed, as I learnt from the very nice 'A Nature Observer's Scrapbook' site, I might even have found some predatory grubs from another species, laid there to eat the Dasineura urticae grubs.

I'm very far from being an expert in diptera (flies). From the Bioimages site however it seems there are several dozen British species in the fly genus Dasineura. This site has pictures of the grubs and galls of some of them.

I have only found one description of an adult D.urticae fly: My copy of Insects on Nettles (Davis, Richmond Publishing) describes a "very small fly with long antenna. Under a microscope an antenna looks like a string of beads...". Unfortunately I haven't been able to find a photograph on the web, although the Bioimages site does carry a photo of another Dasineura species (D. sisymbrii) which I guess may be rather similar since it too has bead-like antenna.

Sadly, that is as much as I have managed to learn about my mysterious fly. How and when the adults mate, how a female locates a host patch of nettles, whether she lays eggs or live grubs, how long the grubs remain inside their gall... I can only guess at the answers to these and a host of other questions. Another garden study-project to add to my burgeoning list!