Hello everyone and welcome to the Indefensive Plants podcast, the official podcast of

Indefensibleplants.com. What's up? This is your host, Matt. Welcome to the show. How is everyone doing this week? I am doing great because we are talking about one of my favorite topics in the world of ecology, and that is Gauls and Gaul formation. I guarantee all of you listening have seen a Gaul, whether you realize it or not, but they are these weird formations that you will usually see on the leaves and stems of plants.

And what's great is that they are formed by another organism, inducing it in the plant itself.

Joining us to talk about this is Dr. Antoine Guillae, who is devoting his entire career to trying to understand the extremely complex

mechanisms underlying galls and their formation. I'm going to let him tell you all about it because he is a

great science communicator. But before I get to that, I just want to say, if you were enjoying the show

and you wanted to continue coming out each and every week, please consider supporting it.

I could not be doing the show without support, and one of the best ways to do that is to become a patron over at patreon.com slash indefensive plants. There's a lot of great kickbacks over there to say thank you for supporting the show. And indeed, I do say thank you. I couldn't be doing this without all of my patrons that chip in just a little bit of financial support each and every month. Once again, that's patreon.com slash indefensive plants.

But that's entirely enough out of me. The world of Gauls is so complex and it's waiting

for you just around the corner. So without further ado, here's my conversation with Dr. Answan

Guillae Geh. I hope you enjoy.

All right, Dr. Antoine Gigi, welcome to the podcast.

I'm really excited to talk to you today.

But first, let's start off with an introduction. Tell everyone a little bit about who you are and what it is you do.

Hello, Matt. So my name is Antoine Gigi. So I was born in the Alps, in France. And quite

rapidly, I became interested by insects and botany. So I, at university, I started to study

so biology and to specialize in ecology and I rapidly be interested in interaction

between plants and insects. And after different internships, I succeeded to find a lab

where I could start a PhD and that was the occasion where I discovered the topic of

goal inductions and goal inducing insects and I rapidly started to be fascinated by this

phenomenon so to a few words about goals so it's a form of tumor So it's an abnormal development of the plant that is

induced by an external organism. So that could be a bacteria, a virus, a mite or insects. And

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