You might have heard about a  particularly dangerous insect in the news over the last few years.

The name makes them almost sound  charming: spotted lanternflies. It sounds like they’d be fireflies  with adorable dalmatian spots.

And they are actually kind of pretty. They have yellow bumblebee-like  stripes on their bodies, and red hindwings with black spots. But when they are outside of their native range, spotted lanternflies are anything but charming.

Because they’re yet another  invasive species that could cause a lot of harm to the environment and to  our food supply if they continue to spread. So let’s talk about these pretty little  insects and why they pose such a huge threat. [♪ INTRO] Spotted lanternflies, also  known as Lycorma delicatula, are originally from China, Japan, and Vietnam. But these bugs have started to  expand outside of their native range, to places like South Korea and way  outside their range into the US.

And they haven’t actually been here for very long. Spotted lanternfly eggs probably first  arrived in 2012 in a shipment of cut stone. But they have made the most of that time.

In just their first twelve years here,  they’ve already spread to at least 14 states. The spotted lanternfly’s preferred  food is the Tree of Heaven, which despite the name, isn’t  a very heavenly sort of tree. For one thing, these trees are  also invasive in the United States, and cause a lot of problems for our local biomes.

In the U. S., groves of this tree of  heaven rapidly crowd out native plants, and they can even produce chemicals that ensure other plants can't  compete with them for resources. Female trees of heaven can produce  more than 300,000 seeds a year, so this is clearly a plant  bent on world domination.

So you would think having something around that eats that tree would be a good thing. But unfortunately that  hasn’t proved to be the case. Because the tree of heaven is so  prolific, it ends up helping to facilitate the spread of spotted lanternflies,  since they can just bop into whatever territory the  trees have already invaded.   The spotted lanternfly normally kicks  off its life cycle on this tree.

It lays eggs in the fall, the adults die in  the winter, and the eggs hatch in the spring. But the thing is, unlike some other bugs  that are adapted to a particular host plant, spotted lanternflies can eat and  lay eggs on other things, too. They don’t need the tree of heaven  to complete their life cycle.

And as we’ve already established, these eggs don’t even need to be on like, a plant. Sometimes they’re on cut stones,  which is how they got here. Manufactured items like campers, barbecue grills, and outdoor furniture are all at risk  of being unwitting lanternfly nurseries.

And these little guys are bloodsuckers, kinda. They’re phloem feeders, which means they eat sap. They’re tree bloodsuckers.

Because sap is basically plant  blood, and when it leaks out, it hardens into a kind of scab to protect  the wounds on the plant’s surface. So to get their favorite snack  flowing, these bugs have to damage the outside of their host plant, which  leaves them vulnerable to infections. And then there’s the honeydew,  and I do not mean the melon.

Because the spotted lanternfly’s diet is  high in sugar, their waste is also sweet. It’s so sweet that scientists call it honeydew. And despite it’s pleasant name and not  unpleasant taste, it is nasty stuff.

The sugars in the waste  encourage the growth of mold, which is not something you  want happening on your crops. And yeah, aside from the  tree of heaven, they love to chow down on our food crops. Stuff people depend on, like  corn, grapes, and soybeans, as well as non-edible but still  important plants, like trees for timber.

Corn and soybeans are the two  biggest crops in the United States. And they also happen to be some major  spotted lanternfly targets, which means these insects have the potential to threaten  major food supply chains for all of us. In Pennsylvania, experts think  spotted lanternflies may cost the state’s agriculture and logging  industries around $500 million annually, at least in their worst-case scenario.

And spotted lanternflies have only  been in Pennsylvania since 2014. So they can start causing mayhem pretty quickly. As with all invasive species,  controlling spotted lanternflies is going to be challenging,  but there’s still hope.

So it turns out that there’s  a crucial time of year when spotted lanternflies are sitting ducks. Since adults die out in the winter,  there are always a few months of the year where there aren’t any more of them  laying eggs, and the eggs they have produced are vulnerable and squishable. This makes manual egg removal a partial strategy, though it’s a bit like playing whack-a-mole.

Which means that researchers  are pretty invested in finding efficient ways to find these eggs. One of the cutest potential  solutions is scent hounds, which can be trained to detect the  eggs so a human can squish them. Less cute but still a decent alternative,  people can be trained to find the eggs.

The Tree of heaven is the  first place you should look, since that’s their favorite snack. It’s easy to spot the egg masses, which are about 1-inch long and resemble a dull, brown mud smear. Experts also say that anyone who spots a  lanternflies’ telltale spots in their area should report them to the U.

S. Department  of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service or your local agency  with an invasive species council. Once the lanternflies are found,  those agencies can use eradication methods like pesticides and sticky traps, though, always, these come with a risk of  capturing native, beneficial insects.

Other researchers are developing  biopesticides that specifically target spotted lanternflies, or  recruiting their natural enemies, such as a fungus that can  colonize the spotted lanternfly. As with other invasive species, especially  in the early-ish days, diligence is key. And that’s what you need to know  about the spotted lanternfly.

While they are just the latest in a long  line of problematic invasive species, it’s worth knowing about them because we are still in a position to control  the spread of this one. So if you spot these troublesome spots  near you, now you know what to do! [♪ OUTRO]