Quivering traps are among ways science is trying to destroy the pest

Science is catching up with the spotted lanternfly as researchers experiment with parasitic wasps, vibrating traps and other strategies to stop the colorful pest.

Before the bug reached the United States, federal funding was already flowing to science labs conducting mitigation research and news media were calling its imminent arrival a plague. When spotty spotted lanternfly infestations were proved to be caused mostly by adults and their egg masses hitching rides on motor vehicles, their spread was called an invasion.

Recent international research has found that while a lanternfly infestation can have dire regional economic consequences, their population centers are somewhat temporary, more like wartime beachheads that launch more contained but potentially devastating incursions.

Lycorma delicatula is native to Southeast Asia and its impact on Chinese agriculture was initially studied in the early 2000s.

Analysis of research conducted in 2019-21 by private industry and universities in China and South Korea said much could be learned by tracking the bug’s migration out of China.

“Biological invasion has been a serious global threat due to increasing international trade and population movements,” said the National Institutes of Health in an overview of the research. “Tracking the source and route of invasive species and evaluating the genetic differences in their native regions have great significance for effective monitoring and management, and further resolving the invasive mechanism.”

More than 390 complete genome sequences from the DNA of female lanternflies captured in four countries were studied to ascertain their origin, dispersal and migration history. The lineage was followed from the late Pleistocene Era to current inhabitations, following the insect’s ancient expansion northward across the Yangtze River.

South Korean populations were the result of multiple invasions from two separate regions of China.

‘A bridgehead’

Spotted lanternflies currently infesting agriculture in Japan and the United States came from a single lineage, which has been called “a bridgehead of invasion.”

The U.S. population, now in 13 states mostly east of the Mississippi River, is the result of a single invasive event. When South Korean produce was unloaded at a Berks County shipping yard in 2014, the stowaway lanternflies found their favorite food — Ailanthus trees, commonly called Tree of Heaven — growing wild and prospering in suburban yards.

Being not particularly picky at meal time, the adaptive pests also sucked the sap from more than 70 species of New World vegetation and by 2017 had spread across Eastern Pennsylvania.

“The environmental conditions, especially the distribution of host Ailanthus trees, and adaptability possibly account for the rapid spread of the spotted lanternfly in the native and introduced regions,” said the report.

Lanternfly eradication efforts in the research realm have included:

• the investigation of various insecticides, oils and other host tree treatments,

• chemicals released into the air by plants,

• development of a lethal fungus,

• traps and detection technologies,

• skewing the lanternfly sex ratio,

• impacts of potential biocontrol species on American forests, and

• deeper dives into the distribution, survival and life cycle of the insect.