States that have to deal with spotted lanternfly: No mercy
Adorned with pale, pinkish gray wings, black dots and a scarlet undercoat, the spotted lanternfly is a beautiful insect.
It’s also an invasive species and a rapacious consumer of plants that has a particularly strong appetite for apple trees, plum trees and grapevines.
If you see one, be ruthless, federal officials and agriculture departments from states up and down the Northeast have instructed. Squash it and destroy its babies before they take over your county, they say.
If that seems harsh, consider this: They lay eggs by the dozens; they leave oozing sap on trees, vines and crops; and when they feed, they excrete a sweet substance that leads to the growth of black mold.
They are no murder hornets; they are harmless to animals and humans. But they can devastate valuable crops like vineyards.
In 2019, researchers at the Penn State College of Agricultural Sciences warned that the spotted lanternfly had the potential to cost Pennsylvania’s economy $325 million a year and 2,800 jobs.
They cover trees by the hundreds and swarm in the air. The sweet substance they secrete, known as honeydew, has coated decks and playgrounds.
“These are called bad bugs for a reason,” said the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture.
The New Jersey Department of Agriculture named its eradication campaign “Stomp It Out.”
In Ohio, residents have been told to scrape off any lanternfly eggs they see on trees, double-bag them, and throw them away or immerse them in hand sanitizer or alcohol.
The need to stamp out the bug will grow even more urgent next month, when the adults must feed voraciously to reproduce so they can lay eggs around October and November, said Julie Urban, an evolutionary biologist in the Penn State Entomology Department who has studied lantern flies for two decades.
She said she had heard joggers in Pennsylvania parks scream when the insects landed on them. Yoga practitioners at a vineyard were unnerved one year when swarms of lanternflies began hitting them, Urban said.
She said she had collected pictures from homeowners who found their decks blackened by the sooty mold. They are so enraging, Urban said, that about two years ago she saw a small girl take off her flip-flop and beat the insects at a pagoda that had become infested. “It was horrible,” she said. Sam Landis, a partner at Vynecrest Vineyards & Winery in Breinigsville, Pennsylvania, said he had no qualms about smashing the insects.
“There’s nothing cute about them,” said Landis, adding that he had been fighting infestations of his grapevines for four years.
In that time, lanternflies have killed off an acre or two of grapevines each year, Landis said. The vineyard had paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to remove dead vines, plant new ones and invest in insect repellent, he said.
But in Landis’ experience, pesticides don’t do much.
“A day or two later, they’re back,” he said.
Lanternflies, which measure about 1 inch long and use their mouths to suck sap from plants and trees, are easy to kill, Urban said.
“We joke that harsh language will kill it,” she said. “It’s pretty delicate for an insect that is so large.”
Most pesticides will kill them, and they are easy to catch and smash. They also die easily when heat or frost arrives.
The most aggressive and effective way to stop their spread is to remove one of their favorite food sources: the tree of heaven, which is also an invasive plant, Urban said.
The lanternflies’ best defense is the ability to reproduce.
They breed in huge numbers, laying 30 to 50 eggs at a time. Their eggs, which can be laid virtually anywhere, including on trees, trucks and the tops of railroad cars, take eight months to hatch, Urban said.
“That gives them time to be transported via humans’ travel,” she said.
Despite its name, the lanternfly is a planthopper, not a fly.
It first appeared in the United States in September 2014, most likely from China, Urban said.
Other states are worried about infestations.
In California in 2019, dead lanternflies were found in cargo planes from Allentown, Pennsylvania.
In Virginia, David Gianino, the state’s plant regulatory official, said lanternflies had laid eggs on railway tracks used by local and Amtrak trains.