Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
5 years later, battle against spotted lanter fly continues
The insect f luttered around her garden, a strange, pretty bug with mottled red, tan and gray wings, and Piper Sherburne admired its beauty.
“That is a different kind of butterfly,” Sherburne said to herself, then sought a nature book in her District Township home, intent on identifying it. It was no butterfly. It was a spotted lanternfly, a mysterious pest from east Asia that had found its way to Berks County, possibly on landscaping stone shipped to District Township from Asia.
A state Game Commission agent discovered the insect on a nearby property in the township in 2014, its first sighting in the United States, but Sherburne found one flitting about her yard weeks before that discovery.
The spotted lanternfly population grew into a horde by 2017, damaging local grapevines and swarming backyards.
At first, District and six neighboring municipalities were quarantined by the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture. But the pest spread to all of Berks, then to 14 southeastern Pennsylvania counties, threatening Pennsylvania’s grape, tree fruit, hardwood and nursery industries, which amount to about $ 18 billion. The insect now has spread to three additional states: New Jersey, Delaware and Virginia.
But this summer, as the fifth anniversary of the insect’s discovery approaches, residents in District Township and nearby municipalities in Berks say the spotted lanternfly surprisingly has receded from the summer landscape, from yards and trees, so much that some wonder if the pesky bug has died off or moved on to greener pastures.
Missing in action
There still are spotted lantern flies in District Township — or “ground zero,” as state officials and Penn State researchers studying the insects often refer to the township and neighboring eastern Berks municipalities. The bugs, currently in a final stage of infancy before growing into winged adults in July, can climb high into trees, out of view, said Emelie Swackhamer, an educator with Penn State Extension’s Montgomery County office.
“It’s hard to know where they are,” Swackhamer said.
Still, this summer she has noticed fewer nymphs, now emerging as tiny red and black bugs with white spots, on trees at her home in Longswamp Township, a neighbor of District Township.
“I’m cautiously optimistic,” Swackhamer said.
There are reasons why,
though they’re speculation based on what researchers in North America have learned about the mysterious insect. Penn State and several other universities in infested states continue to study the insect to find ways to control its spread— or eradicate it, which still is Pennsylvania’s goal, according to Agriculture Secretary Russell Redding.
The spotted lanternfly may sense through the flow of sap they eat that a plant’s vitality is waning and fly to more vibrant plants in other areas, Swackhamer said. The insects’ pointy mouth parts, through which they eat, aren’t muscular: The tree must push sap into their mouths.
“If the nutritional content of the sap is better in another tree, lanternflies will prefer it,” said Swackhamer. But that’s just a theory.
“We don’t have that scientifically proved yet,” she said.
Another explanation: Nature may be stepping in to control the spotted lanternfly population, said Swackhamer. Predators may be emerging, such as fungi that wiped out an infestation of the insects at Antietam Lake Park in Lower Alsace Township last October, a discovery recently verified by scientists. The population of another invasive pest, the gypsy moth, has grown and ebbed over time.
“Nature has a way of finding ways to stabilize things,” said Swackhamer. “We would expect there are natural controls that would act on these insects.”
Living in ‘ the zone’
More research is needed to understand the insect and find ways to keep its numbers low, or wipe it out.
It’s so new to U. S. entomologists that “any time we think we know what lanternflies are doing, it does something different,” said Swackhamer.
Eastern Berks residents
like Sherburne are surprised by the lack of spotted lanternflies they have seen this summer, and are hopeful the worst is behind them. A mild winter beginning in December 2016 could have contributed to the explosion in 2017, allowing adults more time to lay eggs before coldweather could kill them.
Sherburne lives near ground zero — “the zone,” she calls it — in the rocky highlands of District Township, and watched spotted lanternflies stormher property.
They ate the cucumber and basil in her garden, and the Virginia creeper that grows on the side of her house. Out back, in a wooded area on her property that once was a pasture, they swarmed trees and excreted a sticky, clear goo, called “honeydew,” that fell to the ground.
The wooded area “smelled like cider,” Sherburne said.
More than 130 trees of heaven, a favorite food of the spotted lanternfly were removed from the woods by the U. S. Department of Agriculture, which has committed $ 17.5 million in emergency funds to control the spotted lanternfly’s spread.
“When you go out and see several thousand lanternflies swarming a tree and the honeydew is falling on you like rain, it’s scary,” said Sherburne, who chairs the Berks County Conservation District board of directors. “Never saw it before.”
This summer, however, the spotted lanternflies seemto be gone. Sherburne wonders if it’s some sort of cycle of the insect.
“I haven’t seen a nymph yet. It’s wonderful,” she said. “I’m really interested in seeing if we get lanternflies coming through in another wave or if it was just a once- and- done thing.”
‘ I haven’t seen one’
In Lower Alsace Township, Mark Goodwin expected to find nymphs this spring crawling on the front of his house, the shrubs and a large tree in his yard, like
they did a year ago.
He squashed and sprayed them with alcohol last May as they swarmed his porch and yard. This year he was ready for them, armed with spray bottles, sticky bands for trees and a Bug- A- Salt, a salt gun for killing flying insects that’s found in sporting goods stores.
“I was expecting to unleash World War IV on them,” he said.
So far, Goodwin hasn’t seen any in his yard. He lives near Little Antietam Park, where the fungi were found to kill them, so he theorizes that nature cut down the bug’s numbers this year.
“Really amazing. I haven’t seen one,” said Goodwin. “I feel a little left out.”
Ed Overberger, a longtime District Township supervisor, recalls the day five years ago that the state Agriculture Department declared a quarantine in his township. He read it in the Reading Eagle that day, “and as a longtime supervisor, I was going, ‘ What?’ “
Little was known about the spotted lanternfly. An elderly resident called Overberger, asking if she could leave her house to go to the grocery store.
“We just didn’t know what it would do here,” said Overberger.
Local, county and state agricultural officials met soon after, and agreed “to be open and honest” about the spotted lanternfly problem, said Overberger.
He believes that has helped control the bug’s spread: A meeting in District soon after drew a large crowd, and “people stepped up, people wanted to help” smash, spray and otherwise kill the insects, or agree to allow federal and state authorities to remove trees of heaven from their property.
This year, Overberger hasn’t seen any nymphs.
Still, a lone tree of heaven standing in a park across the road from the township’s headquarters, used for public displays of tree banding, will be removed this summer.