This Weekend's Heat has led to a Massive "Hatching" Event for Invasive Spotted Lantern Flies
Ugh. Was sitting on a bench at my local park and this cute little insect/bug crawled up and sort of looked like one of those tiny little jumping spiders at first? It suddenly occurred to me: wait, what if that's a lantern fly nymph? So I looked it up, and sure enough it was a fresh baby lantern fly. I remembered some of the trees around the park from last year that had an abundance of lantern flies on them last year, so I went to check them out to see if I could eliminate any eggs.
Sure enough, these trees were absolutely covered in eggs. I took some poor quality pictures with my crappy phone, so sorry about that. The streaks that kinda look like dried mud are the eggs. When I used my shoe to scrape them off the tree, the bark that was left behind had clearly been eaten/damaged. I should have captured pics of that as well. And unfortunately there were already hundreds of nymphs on the trees. Those black spots are baby lantern flies. They were everywhere. I quickly realized my efforts to eliminate them were futile, as the eggs and nymphs went way up into the tree. I grew up in the woods and realistically I could probably climb those trees and get a lot of them, but for one I don't have time for all that, and for two, most of the eggs will already have been hatched by the time I'd get up into those trees. The park is also a public park, owned by the borough and managed with tax dollars. So I'm positive I'm not really allowed to just be climbing in trees and doing my own version of pest control (also I'd be a liability issue, not that I would turn around and sue my local government if I fell from a tree that I myself chose to climb, but they don't know that and that's how liability works when trying to mitigate it)
I feel a little defeated and discouraged. I have no illusions that I alone could have defeated the local lantern fly population. I do wish I'd thought to start scraping off eggs earlier in the season, though. They probably would have hatched around this time regardless of the heat or weather. They obviously had no problem laying all those eggs these past weeks when it's been unseasonably chilly.
Just a warning, in a couple of weeks, we'll be seeing tons of adult lantern flies everywhere, just sucking our trees dry. Hopefully more predators will become hip to them this year. Seems like a great source of protein for foraging birds with mouths to feed during mating season!