Carcasses litter the ground.
This is the new New York summer, marked by the emergence of the invasive spotted lanternfly, or Lycorma delicatula, which is too lyrical a name to describe such an annoying creature. Spotted lanternflies are a species of planthopper native to parts of East and Southeast Asia, but they first established a population in New York State in 2020. Their main host is the similarly invasive tree of heaven, a stringy deciduous tree slowly taking over the U.S. Northeast, though they will also happily feast on many native trees, like maples and birch trees. Having worked in parks across New York City for four years, I am desensitized to weeding out trees of heaven and smearing spotted lanternflies against the grass. The big summer lanternfly boom has worked its way into my life as a yearly event. The babies—little black-and-red jumping planthoppers—begin appearing in May through July, and slowly grow into the spotted lanternfly we love to hate by the end of the summer. In an attempt to protect our ecosystem, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation sends out public service announcements encouraging people all over the Northeast to kill spotted lanternflies whenever they see them. In fact, the people of New York City have squashed so many of these bugs that places where you would normally see hundreds of lanternflies on a single sidewalk are now only ravaged by a handful.
This success story is not yet mirrored at Vassar College. In Poughkeepsie, a city with about three percent of New York City’s population, spotted lanternflies still run amok without enough humans to sufficiently smash them. Nowhere is this invasion seemingly worse than Vassar Farm Lane, the road that trails past Central Receiving and leads toward the rugby fields and the Preserve. Whenever I walk back to my dorm from the Preserve, I see hordes of lanternflies sunbathing along the wood posts overlooking the lake. Killing one only encourages three others to take its place. After a relatively calmer summer in New York City, where the lanternfly population had been culled by the sheer number of humans after the initial 2020 boom, returning to a city so markedly under invasion brought me back to the months I had once spent stomping on every gray-and-red bug I could.
On one such wood post, I attacked the lanternflies with a recovered vengeance, going so far as to hike my leg up and kick at the ones at even the very top of the poles.
One lanternfly in particular proved to be a remarkably good escapee. It fled the rubber hammer the soles of my sneakers had become, wedging itself into a rotted hole I could not quite reach. Disgusted, and annoyed at its triumphant evasion of me as I sweat under a baking hot sun, I shoved my foot in a bit further. It cowered. Finally—success! I crushed the little bug as best I could at the awkward angle and pulled back, basking in pride, only to discover that I had failed my mission. It had not died.
A chill ran up my bones as it stared into my eyes, bent wings twitching. Turned over onto its back, it could not escape the confines of the very place meant to save it. Remorse began to bubble up in me. This was just a little lanternfly dude, probably trying to get back to his family, and now I have gone and murdered all his friends. His legs squirmed as he tried to turn himself right-side up. It was not his fault that he was invasive. He just wanted to live.
I turned the lanternfly over and set it free.
Though the spotted lanternfly’s main host is the tree of heaven, they feed on the sap of upward of 70 plant species, making those plants more vulnerable to disease and attacks from other bugs. They also excrete honeydew, a sticky substance that promotes the growth of sooty molds, and they threaten New York State’s grape, logging and orchard industries. In short: these bugs are bad news. Too busy being overcome by empathy for the poor lanternfly’s situation, I forgot a very important fact. The life of one lanternfly is not worth the health of our ecosystem.
What can we do? Without many natural predators in the United States, humans have become the stand-in for controlling their population. Stomping on lanternflies is the easiest removal method, even though it can get annoying when they continuously try to fly away. Spotted lanternflies cannot fly very far, so consistency is key. For those high up in the trees, a good old-fashioned fly-swatter can work, or even a vacuum. Vinegar is lethal to spotted lanternflies, and the lovely milkweed plant—which butterflies love and which grows in abundance on our Preserve—will kill lanternflies slowly. Overall, keeping a sharp eye and going after lanternflies whenever you see them is equivalent to doing your civic duty.
We must momentarily put aside our empathy for living creatures and smush these bugs. Love and respect for animals and nature is important, but it is in fact more respectful to understand and maintain our ecosystem than it is to simply try to keep everything alive. The spotted lanternfly may not have asked to be invasive or to come to the United States, but they still are, and they still did. For the health of our beautiful forests and beautiful Preserve, they need to die.