OCTOBER 2, 2019, Philadelphia

The William Hamilton Mansion glows in the early morning autumn light. Its eighteenth-century stone walls and stately Roman columns would make a fitting backdrop for a photo shoot replete with tuxes and satin. But despite the elegant environs, the attendees of this morning’s meeting have gathered for a definitively unceremonious and uncelebratory occasion. This is Spotted Lanternfly 101. “Colorful wingspan, satisfying crunch,” began the invitation in their inboxes. A blue flyswatter sits conspicuously next to the projector at the front of the room. The attendees represent different arboretums, college campuses, and urban farms in the Philadelphia region. One by one these land managers slap on their name tags and hover over a box of hot coffee, waiting for the presentation to begin.   

If you haven’t met the titular character here, or are unaware of the panic it is spreading throughout the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and beyond, it might only be a matter of time before you encounter it, and when at last you do, perhaps take a moment to admire it before you decide to spare or sever its life. Lycorma delicatula is, in many regards, a beautiful bug, with wings spotted like a Dalmatian that flair open in vivid blocks of red and white. This particolored bug is native to India, China, and Vietnam—and has been introduced (accidentally) to Korea (2004), Japan (2009), and most recently, the United States of America (estimated 2012). Despite its substantial wings, Lycorma delicatula is a relatively unimpressive flier and prefers to hop. A video posted on a lanternfly-group Facebook page shows a businessman, briefcase and coffee in hand, shuffling down the street. As he endeavors to squash the lanternfly with his front foot, it bounds away from him in short intervals. Man and insect are bound together in a sort of murderous tango. “Doing the lanternfly stomp”—the Facebook poster comments.       

“After three hops they get easier to squash,” says Thomas McCann, who has come from Penn State Extension to lead the presentation this morning at the Hamilton Mansion, along with Kaleigh Hire from the USDA. After a round of introductions, the lights dim and they begin. The spotted lanternfly belongs to a family called Fulgoridae, Hire explains, a group of insects that are characterized by a diverse array of mouthparts. It is specifically the lanternfly’s sucking mouth, called a stylet, for which it is so loathed. The fly descends on a succulent, sweet-sapped plant, pierces its skin with its long black straw of a stylet, and extracts the plant’s lifeblood for food. Its favorite host is the tree of heaven, but it also feeds on grapevines, fruit trees, black walnut, butternut, river birch, willow, maple—and the list goes on. Lanternfly is a polyphagous organism, meaning it dines on an extensive menu of diverse foods, including more than seventy woody plants and vines.

You just have to spend a minute on a spotted lanternfly Facebook page to realize the tragicomic dimension of current eradication efforts. It’s a bug that doesn’t sting, bite, or carry any infectious diseases, but the sucking swarms, which have been known to coat trunks, cars, and even buildings, can resemble a biblical-level plague. When lanternflies set up residence on a new feeding site, a black residue begins to build up around the base of the swarm called “sooty mold.” This black and slippery mold is a fungus that colonizes the excreted sap the sucking lanternflies drop from above—generally referred to as “honeydew.” But make no mistake, this sugar-rich substance is no melon substitute: it excretes from the anus. If the population of flies is large enough, it will even appear to be raining beneath them—raining excrement, that is. Neither honeydew nor the opportunistic sooty mold kill plants by themselves, but the black mold behaves like sunblock, preventing photosynthesis and causing plants to die back where it spreads.

These slimy, black, moldy droppings have done a lot to make spotted lanternfly Pennsylvanians’ favorite insect to hate. This past week brought the first killing frosts in Pennsylvania, and someone on Facebook posted over a seasonal pumpkin backdrop, “I will miss you all over the winter! See you next kill season LoL.” Scroll down a little further, and there are men with blow torches, ten-foot pipes attached to shop vacs, lanternfly earrings, adult Halloween costumes, a piñata (for festive smashing), mandala sculptures of severed wings, and videos of lunch-hour swatting matches scored with disproportionately dramatic music (think Spaghetti Western, death metal, Star Wars). Someone has photoshopped a lanternfly over the mouth of Jodie Foster on a poster of The Silence of the Lambs, and another vintage graphic has been transformed into “Night of the Living Lanternflies.” There’s now even an app called Squishr, invented to turn our collective eradication of the species into a competitive sport. Squishers under avatar names like “HatesFlies” and “BugGuy” tally their kills to compete for daily and all-time high scores. The date and location of players’ squish points are forwarded to the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture (the uber-squisher) to aid in quarantine efforts.

The trailheads of state parks are now equipped with jugs of fly swatters next to posters that scream “STOP THIS INVADER!” in emphatically large print. In fact, the invasion hysteria reached such a fever pitch in the fall of 2019 that the Philadelphia police force had to issue a public service announcement to tell residents to stop calling 911.

“Please do NOT call 911 to report #SpottedLanternfly sightings,” the police department wrote in the tweet. “While they are a nuisance, they are not a police issue. And on that note, we, for one, would like to welcome our new insect overlords.”

McCann and Hire note in their presentation that one of the big issues with lanternfly is that very few organisms in North America eat it. Even chickens, the garbage disposals of the avian world, turn up their plumage and walk the other way. Hire advances to a PowerPoint slide that itemizes the few insects that will eat the dreaded fly. They are photographed in a series of dramatic close-ups, lined up like a legion of superheroes. The gypsy-moth parasitoid wasp, jumping spider, praying mantis, and wheel bug pose with lanternfly crushed valiantly in clutch or mouth. Someone pipes up in the back of the room to say that the pileated woodpecker also eats the fly, but none of these natural predators, from the perspective of our presenters, pose a grave enough threat to spotted lanternfly to keep the ballooning population in check. Researchers at the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources and the USDA are studying the possibility of importing other insects that parasitize the pest in their native homelands, such as Anastatus orientalis and Dryinus stantoni, minuscule wasps that prey on lanternfly eggs in China.

The practice of inviting additional foreign species to chase proceeding foreign species may sound like a Shel Silverstein poem gone haywire, or an exotic new verse of “There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly.” In the end she swallows a horse “and dies of course.” But the first tale of biological control in the US isn’t so morbid. North American classical biological control began with the introduction of the Australian vedalia beetle, Rodolia cardinalis, over the winter of 1888. Cottony cushion scale insect, a miniature meringue on legs, was inflicting such severe damage on California citrus groves that farmers were ripping out entire trees and torching them. But within a year of letting the voracious Aussie beetle loose on the cottony cushions, the California citrus industry bounced back, and happy farmers were able to fill their harvest crates once more. The application of the vedalia beetle was considered a resounding success and laid the groundwork for the establishment of classical biological control that now supports the study of Anastatus orientalis and Dryinus stantoni, possible allies in the war against spotted lanternfly. I call up Dr. Julie Gould, who has been working on the control parasitoids, to find out more.

“We have been doing this for well over a hundred years with great success,” she says. “Take the ash whitefly. No one talks about ash whitefly anymore because the problem was totally solved. It’s done!” Ash whitefly was discovered in Los Angeles in 1988 and posed a threat to the fruit tree industry, especially apples and pears. Encarsia inaron, a tiny parasitic wasp, best viewed through a magnifying glass, was shipped over from Italy and Israel to deal with the sap-sucking whiteflies. Within two years the pest was practically eliminated in California.

But there are other narratives we can study. In Hawaii there are now close to forty established species of parasitoid wasps, originally released as biocontrol agents for agricultural pests. Many of them turned to attacking native moths and butterflies, whose “diversity and abundance . . . have decreased dramatically over the past century.” The imported parasites have long been implicated as a source of the decline. In other words, the foreign parasitoids, like the spotted lanternfly, are also capable of dining on a broad variety of snacks. Despite their uneven report card, biological control species continue to offer an attractive alternative to pesticides—a chemical-free suppressant to the devastation of agricultural pests, as well as a bulwark against the loss of native wild species. The dream of researchers like Dr. Julie Gould is to introduce a perfectly targeted ecological actor that can allow the humans to stand back and let an unpaid, self-motivated organism reestablish “balance.” But the harmony they strive to orchestrate with the introduction of these biocontrol agents is always at risk of being a dissonant one.

Fortunately, minuscule, opportunistic wasps are not the only thing that can kill spotted lanternfly. Last year, two strands of naturally occurring native fungi, Batkoa and Beauveria bassiana, were discovered coating a swarm of dead lanternflies on the edge of a Pennsylvania apple orchard near Reading. The scientific report reads like the shorthand of a crime-scene detective surveying the aftermath of a mass shooting: “Dead L. delicatula adults were abundant throughout the site, on tree-of-heaven, on neighboring trees and vines, and on the ground.”

The less lethal of the two fungi, Beauveria bassiana, is already on the market as an insecticide that combats termites, beetles, and aphids, and subsequently could be employed to combat lanternfly. The more powerful Batkoa major, however, is more of an unknown. Like the foreign parasitoids in quarantine, it must be researched extensively, undergoing a number of long-term risk assessments before it is released for commercial use.

In lieu of these biological solutions, our presenters at the mansion recommend an approach that requires choosing one chemical from a dizzying list of noxious pesticides: dinotefuran, imidacloprid, bifentrhin, carbaryl, zeta-cypermethrin, malathion, tau fluvalinate, tebuconazole, and parafinic oil. Only neem oil, sticky bands, and pyrethrin I recognize as an organic approach. They suggest that we eliminate 70 to 90 percent of Ailanthus from the grounds we manage, leaving only males, and then systemically inject, drench, and spray the trunks of these remaining host trees—now “trap trees”—with toxic substances, even though the chemicals will certainly kill other insects and pollinators—namely bees, a population already under threat.

“I could grow peach trees, but they have the same problem with lanternflies,” says Richard Fraser, owner of Wycombe Vineyards in Bucks County. Lanternflies just alighted on his grapevines for the first time this month. If his vines are infested for two years running, he won’t just lose a percentage of his crop—he might lose his vines as well. Fraser grows grapes exclusively. He’s got ten acres in production. That’s “six miles of vines one way. The land’s been in the family one hundred years next year.”

Though lanternflies have been widely advertised as tree killers, it would be more accurate to call them tree distressors. They weaken trees, but it would take multiple years of sustained damage, or a particularly dry year, for an infestation of the lanternfly to actually kill a mature tree. The thin trunk of a sinuous grapevine, on the other hand, is like a woody straw in a kid’s juice box. “They suck the juice right out of them,” says Fraser. When I ask him what his game plan is, he takes a deep breath and says, “Well . . . I’m gonna follow the guidelines from the Department of Agriculture. We’ve got thousands of trees here in the surrounding woods, so it’s not really practical that we can scrape the eggs off every one. That’s not gonna happen. Other than that, we’re just gonna have to use the pesticides that they recommend. We’ll put the bug killer out there next year.”

Normally Fraser doesn’t have to use the bug killer on his grapes, only herbicides to prevent fungal attacks. Every four to five years, there might be a Japanese beetle infestation that requires extra measures, but when it comes to the lanternfly this is something he will have to do “all year round.” He’s looking for a spray with a residual effect that lasts seven to ten days, meaning he’ll have to spray about twice a month.

“I don’t want to do it, but I don’t really have any other choice.” 

When I ask him if he’s concerned about the ripple effects, especially the detrimental impact on bee populations, he tells me that grapes self-pollinate: in other words, they don’t attract pollinators. But there is some clover that grows around the vines where the bees do harvest, and he’ll keep that mowed to prevent the bees from ingesting any residual spray.

“We’re concerned about them. But honey doesn’t pay my mortgage payments. You know what I mean? I wish we had something we could spray that doesn’t kill everything out there, ’cause we got a lot of praying mantises and other things. My granddaughter loves the mantises. But I just don’t know how to get around it.”

Spotted lanternfly is, or course, part of a long lineage of foreign pests, including: gypsy moth, emerald ash borer, Japanese beetle, and the brown marmorated stinkbug—to name a few. In an article on the stinkbug, Kathryn Shulz wrote that at present the “vast influx of new [foreign] species costs the United States about a hundred and twenty billion dollars a year and is, after habitat destruction, the main reason the world has lost so much biodiversity.”

Shane Riley has been working for years throughout southeastern Ohio to stop the gypsy moth from wiping out Appalachian forests. He knows the moth is here to stay, and says his team rallies under the motto “slow the spread,” because “stop” long ago faded from possibility. He spends three months a year mounting pheromone traps throughout the woods, to locate appropriate hubs for aerial sprays of bacillus thuringiensis kurstaki (BTK), an organic pesticide usually used to curtail leaf-eating caterpillars. “They eat the bacteria, their guts rupture, and then they die.” But not enough of them to put Shane out of a job. Like Sisyphus pushing his boulder uphill for eternity, Shane returns each year with his pheromone traps to “slow the spread.” The gypsy moth arrived in Massachusetts in 1860 and took about a century to hit Pennsylvania (about 250 miles away). It took the spotted lanternfly approximately six years to travel the same distance, from a shipping palette of landscaping rock in Berks County, Pennsylvania (estimated 2012), to a distribution center in Fredrick County, Virginia (2019). In other words, it’s moving more than ten times as fast as one of our most infamous invasive species. But is it ten times as destructive? Pennsylvania alone brings in one hundred million dollars of annual revenue in the production of lanternfly-preferred foods such as grapes, apples, and peaches. Another nineteen billion dollars of hardwood exports are possibly also jeopardized. The state’s potential loss in revenue spurred the investment of twenty million dollars in research and eradication efforts of spotted lanternfly in 2019. On a more positive note, lanternfly populations seem to be most vigorous on the frontier of their expanse, while the original quarantined counties now report far few sightings than they did a few years ago. The tree coating swarms seem to arrive two to three years after first sighting, and move on after a few years of voracious eating and breeding. Whether this is a result of human intervention or of nonhuman actors and resources is up for debate.

One irony of ecological history is that the salvage logging done in oak-dominated hardwood stands, conducted in the aftermath of extensive gypsy moth invasion, permitted the unprecedented introduction of Ailanthus trees to native US forests—the lanternfly’s favorite host plant. These populations of Ailanthus trees are now paving the way for the spread of spotted lanternfly. Wherever humans are found interrupting ecologies, there are often these unintended, unforeseen consequences. “Humans are moving stuff around on a daily basis,” says entomologist Dr. Julie Gould. “It’s not surprising how many invasives we have; it’s actually astonishing how many we don’t have.”

Ailanthus altissima, the tree of heaven, is one of the fastest-growing trees in America and can sprout a whopping six feet in one year. It is the titular tree in Betty Smith’s acclaimed novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and grows so prodigiously and so relentlessly that it’s more widely considered a weed than a metaphor for resilience. In the United States, Ailanthus has fallen a great deal from grace since its arrival in the mid-eighteenth century. Once a desirable ornamental from China that enticed the avaricious spirit of horticulturists across Europe, today it thrives in the most degraded, inhospitable corners of America’s urban jungles and is often referred to as: “trash tree,” “weed tree,” or “stink tree.” Native to China, it was first introduced to the US around 1785 by William Hamilton at his Philadelphia estate, now known as the Woodlands Cemetery, where I began this article. The tree is dioecious, meaning there are distinct male and female members. As Hamilton brought a male, and not a female, he cannot be entirely to blame for its colonization of the country. But he did go through considerable pains to acquire his prized Ailanthus, and was known to share a handful of cuttings with his closest horticultural confidants. In one letter he exhorted that the plants “should be kept in the Hot House under lock and key . . . [and] nobody should get sight of them.” One can almost imagine him, like Gollum fondling his shiny gold ring, stroking the leaves of his little Asian Ailanthus before locking it in at night. 

One of the few horticultural colleagues Hamilton may have trusted with a cutting was John Bartram, a contemporary horticulturist and explorer, a man some call the father of American botany. It was his garden, another horticulture hub two miles down the road from Hamilton’s hot house, that led most of the American propagation and dissemination of Ailanthus throughout the early nineteenth century. An 1828 Bartram Garden catalogue listed Ailanthus at $1.00 per tree, which, to give you an idea of its market value, was four times the cost of a Lombardy poplar and twice that of a horse chestnut. Ailanthus was prized for its beauty, tropical foliage, rapid growth, and hardy temperament. It took about a century for cultivators to discover that the tree of heaven is allelopathic, which is to say toxic, and exudes substances with properties that harm and displace over two dozen deciduous and coniferous native species. It is an exceptional invader of open, poor, and disturbed soils and an all-around bad neighbor. Though its leaves look a lot like many native species, such as black walnut and staghorn sumac, if you crush them, you can tell an Ailanthus immediately by the fetid odor that it emits. In China it is called chouchun, which literally translates to “foul-smelling tree.” Foul like rancid peanut butter, well-worn gym socks, cat urine, and—some say—sex. This has led to yet another disparaging epithet—the “cum tree.” Ailanthus may not smell like sex to everyone, but it is certainly a sensuous den for mating lanternflies. In fact, the jury is still out as to whether the lanternfly can successfully reproduce without it.

“There are basically two camps around the tree of heaven’s place in reproduction,” says Amy Korman, an entomologist and educator with Penn State Extension. “It’s a difficult thing to determine, because you’d need to grow mature trees in the lab with you,” and it seems the lab is the only place on Earth Ailanthus is not inclined to grow. When I ask her what camp she’s in, Ailanthus-necessary or no-Ailanthus-necessary, Korman says she’s leaning towards the latter. In fact, it is definitely the latter, because there are other trees that they breed on in China, like Toona sinensis—those trees just don’t grow here.

The freshly secreted eggs of a lanternfly look like a thumbprint-sized glob of white silly putty. With time, the putty slowly browns and cracks, appearing like a splash of mud expertly camouflaged against the bark of a tree. Underneath the oozy covering, called an ootheca, the eggs line up like orderly rows of stale Tic Tacs. The ootheca—oo for egg, theca for cover—protects the eggs from predators and inclement weather. 

One of the flies’ superpowers is that they don’t need a tree, or any particular substrate, to lay their eggs on. They can lay them absolutely anywhere. Eggs have been spotted slathered everywhere from tractor tires to garden hats. The adults go into a physical torpor as the weather gets colder, and eventually die with a few heavy frosts, but their haphazardly spackled eggs, where they overwinter, can withstand arctic temperatures. The Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture is currently distributing a lanternfly credit card as an informational resource, which can be weaponized as an effective egg scraper if needed. Next to an egg-clump photo, it instructs the citizens of Pennsylvania to “1. search for egg masses. 2. scrape masses from the surface. Be sure to remove all seed-like black/brown eggs from under the wax coating. 3. Double bag and trash, burn, or submerge the eggs in alcohol or hand sanitizer.”

When I ask Korman what will happen to lanternfly populations if the insect spreads far enough south that warmer climates no longer cause the annual dieback of adults in winter, she says, “That’s a good question! In certain insect populations there’s only one generation per year. And other insects, with no impediments from the weather, they have one or two and overlap. These are parameters we don’t yet know for spotted lanternfly.”

Over thirty counties in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Virginia, West Virginia, Delaware, and Maryland are now under quarantine. Lanternfly has also been reported in New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. To prevent the hitchhiking bugs from spreading farther, businesses in quarantined counties are now required to obtain a lanternfly permit. The permit is granted when a short online course is completed that instructs the business member how to identify and exterminate eggs and insects. Three-hundred-dollar fines and possible criminal citations may be served to persons who violate the order of quarantine. But one only has to look at the rows of wild Ailanthus sprouting along the Philadelphia railroads to understand that if one egg mass started all this, another will eventually manage to get past the quarantine boundaries to spread lanternflies nationwide. It’s only a matter of time. And if they don’t hitch a ride on a rail car, they’ll fly.

Dr. Gould tells me that in September of 2019 she visited the Pennsylvania Hawk Mountain Sanctuary for some bird watching. “I’m with my binoculars looking up at the hawks circling in the thermal drafts, and I’m like, ‘What the heck are those things circling with the hawks up in those thermals?’ They were friggin’ spotted lanternflies. Thousands of them flying south with the birds. It was ridiculous! They were probably using the same uplift from the thermals the birds were using.”

The online permit course is full of combative language. Two stony-faced women in a series of video tutorials with titles like “Egg Masses Search and Destroy” tell me that I’m “on the front lines of the fight” and teach me how to “spot the enemy” and “outsmart these wily stowaways.”

“Wily stowaway” is an interesting characterization of motive. Did a mother lanternfly intend to stow away her babies on a shipping palette bound for North America on that maiden voyage that began this saga about eight years ago? Or would she have preferred them to be closer to home? I don't want to proscribe ignorance where it isn’t warranted, but I think it’s safe to assume that globalized shipping patterns were beyond her comprehension, and that she simply saw a smooth, mountable surface at the moment her ovipositor was bursting with eggs and obeyed a biological urge. But similar characterizations of malice abound in the war against lanternflies. A video on Facebook even warns that they don’t “just ruin crops, but Christmas too.” In other words, scrape those eggs before you haul an evergreen indoors, or Santa might deliver more than a mountain of presents to the warmth of your happy home.      

Not everyone holds the same opinion of invasives, however. Environmental author Emma Marris writes in Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World: “What happens to the concept of ‘invasive species’ if you fold humanity back into nature and consider us just another way species move around, along with migration and ocean currents? Presto change-o, it disappears . . . Indeed, as the planet warms and adapts to human domination, it is the exotic species of the world that are busy moving, evolving, and forming new ecological relationships. The despised invaders of today may well be the keystone species of the future’s ecosystems, if we give them the space to adapt and don’t rush in and tear them out. These emerging, exotic-dominated ecosystems still look like trash to most ecologists. But a brave few have embraced them and given them a more positive name: novel ecosystems.”

When I quote this passage from Marris’s book to Dr. Gould, she laughs sardonically and says, “Nothing interesting!” then takes a breath and adds—“In the native range of something, you have a long evolutionary history. The herbivorous insects have evolved with the plant. For instance, Chinese ash trees are very resistant to emerald ash borer because they evolved defenses against them. But in this country, it found ashes that were totally defenseless. AND, on top of that, there are natural enemies in its native range that supported natural control of the borer. It was released from those as well. So I don’t see where the fire blight of emerald ash borer blowing through this country and killing all the ashes is going to see a positive outcome emerge—there is no balance in that instance. The work I do is trying to restore some of that balance, so at least it’s not going to be an explosive pest killing everything in its wake. Native species tend to exist as components of an ecosystem, whereas, often when you get these invasives, they’re propagating monocultures of only themselves—monocultures of phragmites, where we used to have cattails and sedges, monocultures of salt cedar, where we used to have cottonwoods and willows and ashes. So I don’t buy it.”

Dr. Gould is not on board with Marris’s musings on novel ecosystems, but as she repeatedly hammered me with the word “monoculture,” I could not help but think of Fraser’s grapes stretching for six miles across his vineyard, or the monoculture of corn that spreads as far as the eye can see throughout rural Pennsylvania, and the monoculture of identical townhouses that often supplant them. If the species that make up the plant and animal kingdoms were polled on the presence of humans, how would they categorize our impact? Is it not more correct, when it comes to the term “invasive,” to point the finger at ourselves? And though I sincerely wish that Fraser will be able to carry his nearly one-hundred-year-old family business over the centennial mark, I wonder if it’s not time for our fragile agricultures to evolve into more resilient-cultures.          

Phil Forsyth was also at the William Hamilton Mansion seminar I attended last year. He is the director of the Philadelphia Orchard Project (POP), an all-organic organization that supports over sixty orchards throughout the city of Philadelphia. POP designs its orchards around a food forest model. This model follows a design system that attempts to mirror wild forests by growing mainly perennial species in multi-tiered, synergistic relationships. Spotted lanternfly appeared in Philly last year, and Forsyth is not at all confident that the outbreak will be controlled.

“It’s not going to be eliminated as a pest in the region, just managed,” he says, so he has already started making changes to his designs, putting in native maypop vines, as a possible solution, where a year ago he would have planted grapes. Substitutions like this may seem easy in a small urban orchard, but perhaps his belief in perennial polycultures is worth considering on a larger scale.

One such farm, Apricot Lane, was chronicled in the film The Biggest Little Farm. Farmer-filmmakers John and Molly Chester follow an eight-year journey to build a two hundred-acre, biodiverse, organic farm in Ventura County, California. Their quest to mimic the biological balance found in Earth’s ecosystems is full of obstacles—marauding snail swarms and piles of chicken corpses—but each time they seem to fail, John and Molly find a natural fix instead of a chemical solution. They send geese after the snails and dogs to scare away the coyotes. “All pests, even gophers, have a beneficial role,” says John. Molly adds that it’s a “delicate dance of coexistence . . .  the healthier our row crops, the more the aphids. The better the fruit, the more the birds.” But by the seventh year of farming they are no longer alone in their efforts to make the new ecosystem thrive. The eggs of the aphids’ predators appear in the orchard. A new family of hawks scares away the fruit-guzzling starlings. Eighty-seven barn owls eat an estimated fifteen thousand gophers in one year. Snakes, weasels, and badgers arrive to deal with the rest. And let’s not forget the nine billion microorganisms churning away in the soil, “alchemizing death into life.” How would spotted lanternfly fit in here? How would the threat of various invasives change overall if farmers started propagating polycultures over monocultures—if not out of a sense of conservation (preserving the way plant communities evolved in complex communities for millennia) then out of a sense of pragmatism? We’ve been putting all our “eggs” in one proverbial basket.

“What we need to focus on is restoring functioning ecologies,” Forsyth tells me, “and the damage is generally not from invasives, it’s from humans interrupting ecologies. So now our role needs to be rebuilding them. And in terms of plants, I like to evaluate them based on their characteristics, rather than their point of origin. I feel the same about people,” he says, and chuckles. “How does it interact with other plants, and the environment? Maybe it originated somewhere else, but if it’s adapted well here, and doesn’t interrupt other plants, then I’m ready to give it consideration. Ecologies aren’t static, and the thought that we would try to restore the landscape to any specific time in history seems odd to me.” When it comes to spotted lanternfly, he says: “How do we rebound in an ecology that now includes this new species?” 

“Do you squash them?” I ask.

“Oh yeah. That’s organic!”

The lanternfly seminar at the William Hamilton Mansion concluded with a walk of the grounds to inspect some sticky bands around various host trees where the staff has been monitoring lanternfly nymph and adult populations. As we make our way across what is now the Woodlands Cemetery, I spot four giant dead trees, and ask a staff member what they used to be. “English Elms,” she answers. “They were part of the Grove of Seven Giants. One of the last mature stands in the country.” In 2014 the first three exhibited signs of Dutch elm disease and were removed in order to save the remaining four. These last four giants finally succumbed to Dutch elm disease in 2017. The branches of the elm corpses have been removed and the trunks severed at about twenty feet high. Stripped of their bark, they appear like the smooth marble columns of an ancient ruin—a prescient backdrop to our lanternfly walk. High in the forked point of one of the remaining elm corpses, the sprout of yet another invasive species has seeded itself and is unfurling its signature jigsaw-shaped leaf—the paper mulberry tree. I think again of Marris’s words—“the despised invaders of today may well be the keystone species of the future’s ecosystems”—and cannot help but feel that if a lanternfly would alight upon this paper mulberry sapling just now, invader upon invader, the picture would seem strangely complete.

SOURCES

Behm, Jocelyn. “Tracking the Spread of Hitchiking Exotic Species,” public lecture, Wagner Free Institute of Science, December 5, 2019.

Caltagirone, L.E. and R.L. Doutt, R.L. “The History of the Vedalia Beetle Importation to California and its Impact on the Development of Biological Control,” Annual Review of Entomology 34 (1989): 1-16.

Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. First Mariner Books, 2002.

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Forsyth, Phil. Personal Interview. October 24, 2019.

Fraser, Richard. Personal Interview. October 18, 2019.

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Gould, Juli. Personal Interview. October 30, 2019.

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Korman, Amy. Personal Interview October 29, 2019.

Kummer, Frank. “The Invasion Has Begun: Dreaded Spotted Lanternfly Lands in Philly,” The Inquirer, September 12, 2018.

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“Philadelphia Police: Please Stop Calling 911 Over Spotted Lanternfly Sightings,” CBS 3 Philly, September 12, 2019, https://philadelphia.cbslocal.com/2019/09/12/spotted-lanternflies-philadelphia-police-tweet/.

Phillips, Susan. “Spotted Lanternfly Battle is on: Can Pennsylvania Stop this Invasive Threat to Trees and Plants?” StateImpact Pennsylvania (stateimpact.npr.org/pennsylvania), July 2, 2018.

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