The spotted lanternflies seem to have gone AWOL.
Just a year ago, New York City’s flashiest new insects were impossible to miss. At the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, these invasive insects were out in force, their crimson, polka-dot bodies blanketing the maple trees, marching along the grape vines and flitting around the diners at the cafe.
The insects, which were first detected in the city in 2020, accumulated in such numbers that Shauna Moore, the garden’s director of horticulture, found herself fielding regular calls and emails from visitors alarmed by what appeared to be a full-scale invasion of “these crazy new creatures,” she said.
This year, the insects have all but vanished at the garden. “We’re still seeing a few here and there, but oh, my gosh, they are not in the mass abundance as they were last year,” Ms. Moore said. “It’s remarkable how quiet it’s been.”
Ms. Moore is not the only one who has noticed. Although there is no official count of the insects, spotted lanternflies have been more difficult to, well, spot in the city this summer, experts said. If 2020 was the year the invasive insects took New York City, 2024 might be remembered as the year New Yorkers got their city back.
“They’re still out there,” said Brian Eshenaur, an invasive species specialist at Cornell University. “But we’re just not seeing them at the numbers we have in the past couple years.”
Could it be that New Yorkers’ fancy footwork has kept the bugs’ population at bay?
“We like to think that we’re making a difference by stomping on the spotted lanternfly,” Mr. Eshenaur said, noting that a single female can lay more than 100 eggs in a season. “So if we’re doing that, yeah, we might be making somewhat of an impact.”
But he and several other experts noted that factors other than squishing the bugs may have more to do with their decline. “You’ll notice I mentioned that one last,” Mr. Eshenaur said in an interview.
Scientists still have a lot to learn about the dynamics of the lanternflies’ American invasion, and it is too soon to say whether this year represents the new normal. The lanternfly is also continuing to spread into new parts of New York State, including more sensitive agricultural areas. “It’s still on the move,” Mr. Eshenaur said. “We’ll be living with the spotted lanternfly in the foreseeable future.”
Spotted lanternflies, which are native to parts of Asia, were first detected in the United States in 2014 in eastern Pennsylvania. The insects pose no danger to humans, but they are agricultural pests, feeding on the sap of grape vines, fruit trees and other plants. They are also hardy travelers.
“The adults can hitchhike on vehicles or get into trucks or even aircraft and be transported long distances,” said Chris Logue, the director for plant industry at the New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets. And they can lay their eggs on nearly any hard surface, including trucks and train cars.
In 2020, New York City’s first lanternflies were reported on Staten Island. The insects spread rapidly through all five boroughs and attracted immediate attention. “When they first arrived, they were shocking,” said Jessica Ware, an entomologist at the American Museum of Natural History. “They’re so bright and colorful and unusual.”
Officials urged members of the public to report lanternfly sightings and to stamp or squash the insects — a challenge that many (though not all) New Yorkers took up with enthusiasm.
But this summer has felt different. The lanternflies are still blanketing some neighborhoods, including parts of Staten Island. But overall, the insect population appears to have stabilized or even, in some places, declined. “The invasion wave, as we call it, has dissipated somewhat,” said José Ramírez-Garofalo, an ecologist at Rutgers University.
The total reports of lanternfly sightings are down statewide, Mr. Logue said, but it’s difficult to quantify the decline.
As of Sept. 10, the agriculture department had received about 9,800 reports in 2024, compared with 31,200 reports by the same date last year. However, the department has also announced that people living in areas with known lanternfly infestations, including New York City, no longer need to report the insects. (The department has received roughly 1,000 reports from the city so far this year, compared with 12,700 over the same period last year.)
Even so, Mr. Logue said, “what our inspectors in the city are seeing is definitely smaller numbers of them.”
That is not entirely unexpected. The same pattern has played out in Philadelphia, experts said, and is not uncommon with biological invasions. “First you see really rapid population increase, which is what we experienced in 2020 and 2021,” Mr. Ramírez-Garofalo said. “And eventually you do see that spotted lanternflies and other invasive species eventually get what we call natural enemies.”
Over the last few years, some birds, spiders and wasps might have learned that lanternflies could make a tasty meal; these predators might now be helping to keep the lanternfly population in check, establishing a new ecological equilibrium. “I think they’re just integrating into our ecosystem,” Ms. Moore said of the lanternflies.
In some places, the masses of lanternflies might also simply have moved on after chewing through their favorite foods. That might explain why the numbers appear to have fallen in Manhattan but not on Staten Island, where plants are more plentiful.
This year’s reduced numbers might also be a temporary blip. Maybe climate conditions were less favorable for the bugs this year. Or perhaps the city will see the population boom, bust and then boom again over multiple years. “My gut would tell me that we’re probably going to see some type of a cyclical pattern develop,” Mr. Logue said.
Indeed, scientists cautioned, it is far too soon to predict how the lanternfly invasion will develop over the short term, let alone the long one. “We don’t know if it’s going to be the same next year,” Dr. Ware said.
Even if New York City itself is past the worst of the infestation, the threat is not over. The lanternflies were detected in new locations this summer, Mr. Logue said, and are inching closer to grape farms and vineyards.
“This is the first year we’ve actually seen bugs in our vineyard,” said Kareem Massoud, a winemaker at Paumanok Vineyards on Long Island. This summer brought just a few insect invaders, but Mr. Massoud is bracing himself for a mass arrival next summer.
Unfortunately, he said, there’s not much that he can do to stave off the swarms. But anything that keeps the insects’ numbers down will help. “So keep squashing them,” he said.
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