Talk:Biorhiza pallida

A fact from Biorhiza pallida appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 3 January 2013 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that oak apples are caused by the larvae of Biorhiza pallida (adult pictured) and may also contain up to twenty other species of gall wasp larvae, most of them hyperparasites?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2013/January. The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Biorhiza pallida.

Wikipedia

Comments

This article is a jumble of copied and pasted facts from contradictory sources. First, this is on the main page saying "that oak apples are caused by the larvae of Biorhiza pallida." The Wikipedia article on oak apples tells us otherwise.

One source says, "the more commonly seen "Oak apple gall" is the sexual generation on the buds and the agamic generation root gall is found on the roots of the tree," but this section of the article emphasizes, over and over, the agamic females as the egg layers, without clearing up the sexual generation of the oak gall. This paragraph is tied to two sources, a problematic Britannica article and what appears to be a blog about hedgerows, written by an unidentified person.

This is a well-studied gall wasp. There are plenty of excellent articles about it, and the information could be written in a coherent manner so the reader could follow. It could also include the correct information, that it is a member of a tribe, that it is well known and well studied as a model ecological community, but, instead, you relied upon a less-then-correct fact, saying B. pallida creates the gall apples, while the article on the galls says it is members of the tribe.

You don't include the tribe, and it is of taxonomic and evolutionary significance. The article is disjointed, badly source, unclear, contradictory, emphasizes random things, while missing the beauty of this organism and its communities.

Fail.

--68.107.134.74 (talk) 20:33, 3 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Distribution

What's the distribution of this animal? Waylah (talk) 02:31, 5 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Waylah: I added a reference which states that it has a widespread distribution and mentions 10 European countries where it occurs. Cwmhiraeth (talk) 06:18, 5 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]