It may go against your grain, but you must, as Gothamist put it, “Destroy them! If you spot a live one, you should squash it while shouting, ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds!'” The instructions across the board are to kill them on sight. The full extent of economic damage this insect could cause is unknown at this time.”Īnd that doesn’t factor in the damage to beloved backyards, parks, and natural landscapes, and our enjoyment of them.Ĭombating SLF will take a grassroots effort. New York’s annual yield of apples and grapes has a combined value of $358.4 million, which could be greatly impacted by SLF. SLF also excrete large amounts of sticky “honeydew,” which attracts sooty molds that interfere with plant photosynthesis, negatively affecting the growth and fruit yield of plants. This feeding by sometimes thousands of Spotted Lanternflies (SLF) stresses plants, making them vulnerable to disease and attacks from other insects. Adults and nymphs use their sucking mouthparts to feed on the sap of more than 70 plant species. The DEC explains that SLF “pose a significant threat to New York’s agricultural and forest health. How bad is it? And what is being done to defeat these bugs? And then today, 8/14, I killed one in Central Park!! I was seated outside at Tavern-to-Go and one landed near us.” (See picture above.) “One sighting was a dead one, on 7/29 (that’s when we initially looked into it, we’d never seen a bug like that before!), and once yesterday (one flew up and landed on the back of the building, just a little too high for me to kill it unfortunately). “I have twice now spotted the incredibly invasive Spotted Lanternfly on our 14th floor terrace,” said Olivia Henderson, who lives on West 72nd Street, between CPW and Columbus. Spotted lanternflies have also been seen on the Upper West Side. The Ailanthus is the main host tree, and we have less than 50 in the Park.” On Thursday, August 19, a spokesperson for the Central Park Conservancy, which maintains Central Park, confirmed in an email to WSR, that SLF “ have been spotted in the Park and they are bad news.” However, she added, “The Park is not home to a large number of the types of trees that serve as hosts for the Spotted Lanternfly. This August, CBS New York announced, “T hey’ve moved to Manhattan…now in larger numbers in neighborhoods a hop, skip and jump from Central Park.” By August, 2020, they had “s pread in fluttering hordes to Maryland, Delaware and New Jersey,” The Times reported, and to Staten Island, the DEC said. “Despite a quarantine effort, they have also been discovered in small numbers in New York, Delaware and Virginia,” The Times continued. In 2018, The New York Times called SLF “ an invasive pest with a voracious appetite and remarkable reproductive talents.” They had first appeared in Pennsylvania in 2014. Spotted lanternflies - SLF, as the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) refers to them - don’t actually fly they hop on the wind from leaf to leaf, or onto pieces of firewood, outdoor furniture, or other things humans move around - like ocean liners. Second, they’re not going to involve anything resembling Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. “Although it can infest trees and weaken them if the infestation is bad, they are mostly a threat to agricultural crops.” The NYC Parks Department clarified: “The Spotted Lanternfly does not kill trees it infests,” a spokesperson told WSR. It is a major threat, however, to many fruit crops and trees, according to the U.S. How worried should we be about this new bug in town called the spotted lanternfly?įirst of all, it is not harmful to humans, pets, or livestock.
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