I don’t need to invent a scary story for the blog this Halloween. There’s a real one here.

“It’s a beautiful bug”, admitted my wife, Kris. In fact, it comes in a costume appropriate for the holiday. 

Although the spotted lanternfly plague covers much of Connecticut, Windham County has so far mostly escaped the assault. You may not have seen one yet. Around Norwich to the east and Hartford to the west, the insect was apparently far too easy to find.

In a lot of online science sites, the spotted lanternfly is referred to with initials, as an “SLF” (Reminds me somewhat of “DJT”). It is native to China, as is its favorite food, the invasive and smelly Ailanthus, Tree of Heaven. But the insects will feed on more than 60 plant genera, sucking sap with stabbing mouthparts. As Douglas Tallamy explains in How Can I Help? they arrived in PA in 2014 “as egg cases on shipments of ornamental rocks from China” and spread into CT in 2020.

Our first freeze killed them, but those egg masses will overwinter. We will soon be learning to see those and crush them. “They love grape vines and apple trees and can ruin fruit production.” Joshua’s Trust will need to monitor our apple orchard carefully as it will be on the menu, maybe as soon as next year. And check for any Ailanthus around the Atwood Farm.

Adults can fly short distances and jump well. A lanternfly may even leap right at you if it thinks your silhouette is a tree to consume. On a September visit to the Mohegan Sun casino for lunch where we parked on the top level of the garage, there were plenty of them to stomp on. I tried. They have good eyesight for motion and changes in light. And they’re FAST. It was like trying to catch your cat to bring to the vet (although not as dangerous). Or guarding Jordan as he dribbles toward the basket with the game on the line. You will learn, as I did, to sneak up from behind.

“Eat, Pray, Stomp.” Jokes have started as the bug has now conquered New York City. Kate McKinnon on SNL: it’s “a burlesque dancer with fishnets. No mercy, murder them on sight.” And not so funny: Exodus 8-24: “and all the land was corrupted by the swarm of flies.” Or Exodus 10-15, on locusts: “they did eat every herb of the land, and all the fruit of the trees”.

News gets a little better from Tallamy, whose property in PA has had lanternflies since soon after the ornamental rock invasion. He explains that removing the Ailanthus host tree removes a chemical that makes the insect taste bad. His young American birds seemingly then found them edible. Furthermore, “the good news is that there are no records of spotted lanternflies killing trees.” In addition, CT DEEP has recently determined that bats also prey on lanternflies.

If you find yourself visiting an area with lanternflies, take note: they hitchhike and supposedly can hold onto a car at 60 mph. Don’t bring one home with you. In 1874 it was locusts. Since then, we’ve been treated to African ants, fire ants, the boll weevil epidemic, wooly adelgids, Formosan termites, killer bees, emerald ash borers, deer ticks, and now mosquitoes with malaria and the Zika virus, to name just a few insects. And it’s not even a decade since the spongy moths also destroyed much of Connecticut’s woodlands. Listing all our invasive animals and plants would take another page or three. Then again, E. O. Wilson wrote in the Harvard Gazette in 2005, maybe tongue in cheek or maybe not, that “the first invasive species to the New World was the Europeans.”

George Jacobi