“I can’t think of something they don’t lay their eggs on-cloth, metal, furniture, sides of buildings and of course trees,” Ronnit Bendavid-Val, the director of horticulture at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, told the Times’Ginia Bellafante in 2021. They also lay their eggs on cars, among other places. The adult bugs can travel by flying into car windows or attaching themselves to clothing. “On their own, spotted lanternflies can only fly up to five miles,” Brian Eshenaur, senior extension associate at Cornell University’s New York State Integrated Pest Management Program, tells the Washington Post’s Kevin Ambrose. The bugs wouldn’t have been able to spread so far without some (accidental) assistance from humans. And Michigan reported its first sighting just last week. The first of these bugs in New York City were detected in 2020. in 2011 in a shipment of stones, per the New York Times’ Anne Barnard. Scientists believe lanternflies arrived in the U.S. Anne Johnson, an entomologist at Pennsylvania State University, tells Gizmodo that the lanternflies could be setting up a “boom-bust cycle” of abundance, which could explain the apparent surge in their numbers this year. This summer might be a particularly big one for the bugs. They finish growing into adults in July, mate in August and start laying eggs in September. Spotted lanternflies have a year-long life cycle. Spotted lanternfly nymphs in the fourth instar of their life cycle ![]() And they have no natural predators in the United States. The insects can feast on several plants, including walnut, oak, maple and apple trees, as well as cherries and grapes, according to the U.S. In 2020, a study estimated the lanternflies could cause $324 million in yearly economic damages in Pennsylvania alone. Their spread has particularly alarmed the agriculture industry. The bugs also release a sticky, sugary waste product called honeydew, per the Guardian, which attracts sooty molds that can interfere with plant photosynthesis. When they drink sap, lanternflies weaken trees, making them more vulnerable to other pests and diseases. But they drink the sap of a hundred different plant species and damage crops and trees, reports Gizmodo’s Angely Mercado. Spotted lanternflies can’t harm humans or animals. “But when I came today, I came to kill them. “I didn’t know up until yesterday that they were supposed to be killed,” he said to the Guardian last week. Jaeso Rich, a Spotify employee in New York City, tells the Guardian’s Naaman Zhou that he went out to kill lanternflies on his lunch break. Now, scientists and local governments are asking people to kill these invasive bugs on sight. Spotted lanternflies, native to China and southeast Asia, are a voracious and quickly spreading threat to plants. Eight years later, sightings of these insects have been reported in over a dozen other states. In 2014, swarms of white, red and black speckled bugs showed up around Pennsylvania.
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