The Blob! It’s revolting! It’s oozing! It’s sweeping the Island! Will no cedar tree be spared?

“It looks like something you’d see in a horror movie,” says Polly Hill Arboretum outreach coordinator Karin Stanley referring to Cedar-Apple Rust, a ridiculous looking tree fungus that has seen an unusually robust late spring and early summer here on the Vineyard.

“I don’t know if it’s necessarily worse this year than past years,” says Polly Hill collections manager Tom Clark, “but it’s definitely been a little more dramatic because it was so dry and then we got a wet spell and it erupted. I think it came all at once and people have really noticed it.”

Polly Hill director Tim Boland says that Islanders’ fears that the ungainly orange blobs with gelatinous appendages will soon spawn an alien brood that will terrorize Atlantic avenue are largely misplaced.

“They’re pretty funky looking but it’s mostly an aesthetic problem. This stage is called the teliospore stage where they form those weird looking telial horns. Then they release their spores into the air, some of which land on apple leaves and start their cycle again.”

Although the fungus can defoliate apple trees and limit the overall supply of energy available to the tree to grow fruit, it most likely will not affect the success of a tree over the long term.

“If the leaves on a tree can make it to about July 15 then they’ve already stored and absorbed enough carbohydrates in their roots for the next year’s leaves to rebud.”

However, Mr. Boland does not underestimate the ability of the fungal blobs to shock and disgust.

“I used to teach a plant pathology class and I would take one of those orange blobs and hold it up and say, ‘Man look at this thing on my face. I’m seeing some doctors but I can’t seem to get rid of it.’ They always remembered that lesson.”