Horses and Spotted Lanternflies: What You Need to Know

- [Brian] All right.

- All right, so today's presenter is Brian Walsh.

He's a member of the horticulture team here at PennState Extension.

So Brian, why don't you take it away?

- All right, thank you, Laura.

So my name is Brian Walsh.

I'm a horticulture educator based in Berks County, Pennsylvania.

I came to this position in a little bit roundabout way.

My background is actually in more commercial horticulture, landscaping, commercial pesticide application, and when I was unfortunate enough to have a spotted lanternfly arrive very close to my backyard, when it first got here, as a commercial applicator, we were faced with trying to figure out what to do, when to do it, and what would give the best results for our customers.

And so pretty quickly we realized that some of the assertions that were being made by some of the people that were coming in to look at it, weren't really matching what we were seeing on the ground.

And so with my company, we started doing our own private research, and then slowly started working with some of the PennState entomology folks, and then when this position opened up, I started with PennState in 2019.

Majority of what I do is dedicated specifically to lanternfly research, so I will give you the best of the information that we have at the time, right now, and with regards to, will it change, it's possible.

We're still learning a lot, we still have a lot more to understand about this insect.

It's turned out to be quite a bit more complicated than it was originally given credit for, and with that I'll also say, I don't know horses at all, but thankfully we have Laura, Danielle, and Brittani here to help with that end of it, but from the pesticide end, a lot of it's gonna pretty much play the same, just a little bit different than the hort side.

And so what we have with spotted lanternfly, what it is, it's Lycorma delicatula, discovered first by a gentleman named White, in about 1845, and it's a big insect.

It's over an inch long as an adult, and it's got those very colorful hind wings, and when the sexual maturity begins to finish up in the fall, that abdomen swells up and you get those yellow bands, but that's not always there, and not always present.

And so much more common as you see them with their wings closed, and in small numbers, they're really easy to miss.

So what's the big deal with spotted lanternfly?

Well, taking it right from the headlines, different things you may have seen, heard, "Why napalm is not the answer," I think that is my favorite of all time quotes.

That was never given to me as an option from my pesticide dealer.

It could mean trouble for New Jersey, Michigan's worrying about lanternflies, report their sightings of the invasive hitchhiker, vineyards turning to aliens.

I hope they are benevolent aliens, not the ones from "Independence Day." "Spotted lanternfly mania and infestation," "US agriculture's biggest threat," and then we have these kind of headlines that garner a lot of attention, but don't do much to actually help with facts.

And so this one, "The worst invasive species in 150 years.

18 billion in losses," we are nowhere, nowhere near 18 billion in losses, and I would argue that this is not anywhere near the worst invasive in 150 years.

We look at emerald ash borer and what it's done to our ash forests, going on right now, finishing up on the eastern side of the state, millions of trees killed, that is much more of an impact than anything we've seen from spotted lanternfly.

Spotted lanternfly is not benign in any way, shape, or form, but it's not that bad, that it's the worst in 150 years.

And so the whole point of this talk is get yourself informed, make good decisions, check back with our website.

We have a lot of information that's currently up that is constantly updating.

And from the early years, this was discovered in 2014 at the border of Pike and District Township, right here in the lower corner of Berks County.

And you can see immediately, quarantine was put out, the yellow boxes by municipality.

In 2015, it jumped out a little bit further.

By 2016, there's blue boxes, and it kept growing out the populations by municipalities, and by 2017, the state decided to go with a county-wide quarantine.

And that does not mean that every point in those counties are quarantined or, excuse me, it doesn't mean that every point in those counties have breeding populations or that they're present at every point in there.

What it means is the quarantine was put there to regulate the sales and movement of goods that might help move the spotted lanternfly, and that's really what the quarantine's all about, to help prevent it from moving faster and farther than it would naturally.

And so lanternfly, it's a plant hopper.

It's native to China and Indonesia and Vietnam, was probably introduced as an egg mass, and I'll show you some pictures in a little bit, and you can see that it's very easy to miss single egg masses.

And it probably went unnoticed for several years, based on the number of egg masses found at the site of introduction, until the population got big enough that it was actually noticed.

And what they do is they feed on the plant phloem, which is mostly that sugar-rich layer just underneath the bark.

That's the area of the tree plants that can transport both water up, and sap up and down, and it's the only part of the tree where the liquid movement is up and down.

And so because they feed on that and it's sugar rich, they can't digest all of the sugar and process it all, and so they expel it as, the waste is a liquid excrement we call honeydew, which is also very still sugar rich.

Because it's sugar rich, then that honeydew, whatever it lands on, it becomes a great substrate for sooty mold.

And right off the bat, to date, only grapes, Ailanthus altissima, also known as tree of heaven, and I'm gonna use them back and forth, those two terms, Ailanthus altissima, Ailanthus tree of heaven, TOH, it's talking all about the same plant, the same tree, which is an invasive also in the United States, but only those two have been known to be killed, and occasionally some saplings of walnuts or other species if they get overwhelmed, but for the most part, trees are not being killed outright by spotted lanternfly.

Even with the Ailanthus, it takes several years of feeding to kill those trees, and so the urgency is not an immediate acute threat that you have to get out there and spray immediately when you see them.

Take your time, make good choices, and don't make the problem worse.

So the spotted lanternfly is univoltine, it has one life cycle per year.

Not completely unusual with insects, but this has a very long, long lifecycle.

The egg masses are laid in the fall.

The adults then freeze to death and die, and the egg masses will carry on and persist through the winter.

They look like this when they're first laid.

In the spring, generally, in middle of May in Southeast Pennsylvania, the nymphs will hatch.

They'll have this black and white spotting on them, about a quarter-of-an-inch long, and they'll go through three molts, called instars, that, approximately, will have them double in size with each molt, until they get to the fourth instar, which then all of a sudden has this red pattern with the black and white.

The black and white nymphs are very easy, in the first instars, to mistake as ticks or spiders, or things like that, but if you go and you try and give them a little bit of a push or a bump, they'll hop.

They're very strong hoppers, hence the name plant hoppers.

The fourth instars with the red, they are very distinct, maybe a little bit look like boxelder bugs, but there's not a whole lot that look like them.

They don't have wings at that point.

The left final molt isn't til the adult phase, and you see in picture D here, at least about an inch.

The size can vary quite a bit.

The males are smaller than the females, but when those wings are closed, they blend in very good with trees, with other objects that they kind of just fade into the background, and it's not until you see those wings open and you see those hind wings with the bright red that you know, definitely, you're looking at spotted lanternflies.

And so this life cycle takes place through the course of the year.

It's not uncommon to find nymphs at the same time as adults, and different stages of nymphs at the same time.

We just found some fourth instars yesterday in Berks County, so it's not uncommon, but majority of them will be in one life stage at a time, that you're gonna encounter.

And this is once per year, one cycle per year where there's a killing freeze like there isn't a northeast.

If this gets down south where there is no killing freeze, then we don't know.

There may be multiple generations per year, and that can be problematic for agriculture and the folks who live in those areas.

Like I said, they hatch in May.

Each egg mass has between 30 and 50 eggs, as an average.

You can have as few as just a couple or as many as 60, 70, but the average is 30 to 50.

And that egg mass is pretty small.

What's kind of unusual is the eggs will hatch from that individual mass over a period of about two weeks, so they won't all hatch at once.

Each morning, you can go out and find them, and some will hatch out of the mass, not all at the same time, and microclimates make a huge difference.

If you have a egg mass that's facing a macadam parking lot where it absorbs a lot of heat, then they may hatch quite a bit earlier, several weeks earlier than a north-slope-facing tree that's holding an egg mass.

The timing can vary greatly just in a very small geographical region.

We do know that some amount of chill increases the hatch success rate, but it's not necessary, and so, again, for southern regions, this could be very problematic.

They will be able to hatch out without a chill, and cold weather death of eggs in Pennsylvania has not been an issue.

Eggs have gone through minus 15 here, touching on minus 15 at night, but obviously, we don't get that sustained for any amount of time in Pennsylvania, but unfortunately the colder winters don't really seem to impact the survivability of the eggs.

When they do hatch, the first through third instars are very, very mobile.

They'll feed on tender plant tissues, not necessarily just trees.

They will feed on leaf tissues of trees.

What's a little bit unusual about this insect is that the eggs can be laid just about anywhere, not just on the plant host that the nymphs will be feeding on.

Roses are a really good indicator species if you have roses.

It can be domesticated roses, it can be the multiflora rose that we all hate so much, they really like that, and if you have roses, that's a good place to check in the early parts of the spring and summer.

Hollyhocks, those are red twig dogwood leaves there, if it's soft and it's tender, and they can get their mouth parts into it, they're gonna feed on it, but at that point, they're pretty dispersed.

They don't feed all together.

They're not aggregated.

And so we also know, prior to what was previously thought in the beginning, they do move quite a bit.

And this was an experiment that was done with Dr. Hoover's lab, where nymphs were taken, and they were rolled in a fluorescent dye powder, and then released in a forest setting.

And then volunteers and the researchers went out with ultraviolet lights and checked how far out from the release point they were re-encountering the nymphs, and with the ultraviolet lights, you can see that the lanternflies light up like a Christmas tree bulb, and it's, I absolutely highly recommend going out with an ultra light light in the woods in the dark, and you'll be amazed at the critters that are moving around that you had no idea were there.

But there is a little bit of a asterisk to this study, and that when those nymphs were rolled in the fluorescent dye powder, it was very wet.

We had a lot of rain and they kind of got caked up and maybe their ability was a little bit in impaired.

Despite that, the third instars, the median distance moved from the release point 7 days post release, the median was roughly in the 15 meters, so approximately 45 feet, as far out the max was 65 meters.

So if you imagine each week that these tiny little nymphs are able to walk 65 meters, they're spreading quite a bit.

They go until they find something they like to eat, and then they drop off the trees or the plants, then they go a little bit more.

So with that, when we get to the fourth instars, you'll start to see them aggregate more, congregate more in groups to feed together.

They'll start to appear as fourths in July, and they'll cluster on more preferred host, more specified host material.

This tends to be the Ailanthus altissima, or tree of heaven, black walnut, some other plants like that, and all of a sudden we'll see them going from being very dispersed evenly out through the landscape to really concentrating down on certain plants, and they still move quite a bit.

You may see them on that one tree today, and they may be gone tomorrow or in two days, and you go and find them, and they'll all be grouped up on a different plant.

This is the point when we start to see the honey dew production getting much more serious in terms of volume, as well as the impact of the plants.

They'll start to bleed down a little bit more heavier because they're concentrated and they're bigger.

So the fourths then will molt, roughly the end of July in our area.

This is what they look like as they break out of their shell.

They have wings.

That color will change back about an hour or so, and you'll see them start to look like that familiar adult that we all know and love so much.

Like I said, when their wings are closed, they blend really well with tree bark.

Those bands are not always there.

When they first turn into adults, you can see that the bands are not present at all.

This will come in time as the sexually develop and their abdomens expand kind of like a big accordion, that's when you start to see the yellow striping develop first down the lateral sides, and then across the abdomen.

And at this point, as adults, it's really easy to tell them apart.

The males have that black valvifer, the females have that red valvifer on the end, the last segment of the abdomen.

So, as I said, it's a plant stressor.

It's not necessarily killing them.

You can see honeydew and subsequent sooty mold on the left, you can see the compound leaves that are completely drained down, you can see that the sooty mold will block photosynthesis from happening in the leaves below where they've been feeding, you can see when they group up, how hard they're pulling nutrients out of those leaves.

It's a stressor.

The nutrient loss, the massive numbers can kill limbs, can we can plants, but it does not kill plants outright.

The spotted lanternfly is remarkably able to self-regulate.

When it's not getting what it needs, it moves along, and it moves along in real time, and that is very, very important when it comes to senescence time.

And senescence is the fancy word for when the trees start to change color for the fall.

When the tree start to pull their nutrients down to the roots for the winter, that's generally termed senescence, and at that point, when the trees senesce, there's no good phloem moving in those plants, and so the lanternfly will move, and at this point, we'll see them off on new species.

And so Ailanthus that are tree of heaven that's fed on heavy, will tend to senesce earlier because it's stressed, and so we see a lot of movement to maples.

And it may be that they just prefer maples at that time, anyway, regardless of the senescence.

We're not sure, but we do know that in Pennsylvania, maples, birches, willows, they've all been very hot hosts from time to time, and this is what a picture of a silver maple looks like, and this is my backyard.

And because that's where they're finishing out that lifecycle, that's where they tend to lay their eggs is on or near those trees that they're feeding on.

And unfortunately, what we can't do with this is stop insects from moving onto a property.

And this is my backyard, again, that same tree, systemic treatments and insecticide that is taken in is applied to a plant, excuse me, and then it gets translocated through the vascular system of the plant, making it toxic when the insects feed on them.

You can see, it can have really big results.

And so properly used, properly timed insecticides can be very effective at reducing populations.

Overall, it's not gonna take the bigger population down.

Your efforts on your property will have a small impact, but I don't want anyone to think that there's an urgency to kill everyone on your property to do your part to help stop the population.

It's beyond that at this point.

There was a time in 2014, 2015, 2016, when that was a good thought, when it was very localized, but it's far beyond that at this point.

And so what we can tell with using these insecticides carefully, you can have a big impact.

And unfortunately, one of the downsides of this is that those abdomens are very full of fat bodies.

They start to rot, they smell like a dead animal on the side of the road in August.

After a few days, it stinks God awful, but you can see the twitching.

That's an indication of dinutefuran insecticide ingestion, and they lose control of their wings and flap like that.

So, as I said, in the fall, they're gonna start laying their eggs, and it's almost been perfectly lined up with the fall equinox in our area.

It seems to be more to do with the day length than it has to do with growing degrees that most insects are guided by.

That's still being researched, and is a little bit out on the jury, but we've seen it year after year now.

By size comparison to a penny there, that's 30 to 50 eggs, right there, not much bigger than a penny.

You can see how narrow that egg mass is.

The eggs are then covered up with a waxy substance that actually is a protein, and we think that helps protect them so that they don't desiccate through the winter.

In terms of going out and scraping eggs, that was an early control strategy, unfortunately, as we went out and cut down a Ailanthus trees and just straight dropped them, measured where the egg masses occurred, most of those eggs are in the upper two thirds of the trees.

So over six meters, roughly over 19 feet, that's a long way up to be out to try and scrape those eggs off and kill them as control strategy.

We don't recommend that people go out on ladders and try and get to the tops of trees.

It's not practical and it's not safe.

In terms of, if you see eggs, you can just smoosh them.

They pop like zits, they pop.

You can scrape them into an alcohol-containing solution, either rubbing alcohol or hand sanitizer, dispose of them that way.

Every egg mass you get rid of is 30 to 50 less.

It's not a bad thing to do, but please don't be unsafe and think that you're gonna affect the population.

And what's really unusual about this whole order of insects, with Fulgoridae, is the unusual nature that they will lay their eggs not necessarily on a host plant.

These are all examples that have come in from people.

I mean, a light bulb, tires, you can see, just about any object that's near a tree that they've been feeding on, they'll lay on that as long as it's semi-firm, and particularly if it is sheltered a little bit.

They tend to be on the underside.

They like to be a little sheltered where they lay their eggs.

And so when it comes to how these insects are moving, it's as simple as the eggs are laid on an object, such as a trailer, which is then taken somewhere else, or a camper, which is then moved to a campground for the spring where the eggs hatch out.

There's been a number of instances where that's happened, and it's also a very good hitchhiker.

This is a 65 time magnification of a tarsal claw of a spotted lanternfly, and you can see, there's an arolia pad there, which is like a suction cup such as houseflies have, and they can walk on the ceilings, and you can see the tarsal claws, and with that, they're able to hang on.

I've seen them on my car hood up to 35 miles an hour, so you can imagine if they're in a trailer or if they're underneath the undercarriage of a vehicle, and they're sheltered from the wind, they can go for quite a ride.

With horses, there's a double whammy.

If you're moving your horses around, you can't keep the horses enclosed in the trailer in the heat, and so your windows are open, and if you have an open trailer, it's definitely a risk for more probability of moving spotted lanternflies if you are in an area where there's an active population.

And so there's some things that you can do to prevent that.

In terms of how it spread, from 2017, the population has marched pretty quickly across the state.

There's some big jumps there.

And when we get to where we're at now, this is the most current, we're as far as Cleveland, Ohio, out to Indiana.

Indiana was a situation where a camper had eggs on it and it was moved there, up into Connecticut, up near Ithaca, New York, down through Virginia.

Not to say that it's solid populations in all of those places, but these are all counties that have breeding populations, established populations.

Now, if we take what we think is the natural spread, and we put that circle out, that covers that region right there.

Almost certainly, all these other jumps are human moved and human-assisted movement, and so humans can do their part to slow this spread down, to give more time to researchers to figure out other ways of dealing with it.

Unfortunately, the public is helping it go faster and further.

So don't take it with you, inspect your trailers before you travel, also inspect for the appropriate lifetime, life cycle timing.

If they're in a nymph phase, try not to park under trees where they're gonna drop down, try not to be near them, look through, look and inspect your vehicles.

If you are parked for long durations in one spot, check for eggs before moving, especially with trailers that may be parked near a barn.

If you're gonna move it to another location for the summer, don't take it without inspecting.

If you can, pack up in the morning.

Lanternflies tend to fly a whole lot less in the morning, they're less active then, so if you're loading a horse trailer, if you're loading your truck, try and do it in the morning time and take advantage of that behavior.

Park in the open.

Everybody likes shade, but park in the open.

If you can, try, and especially if there's an active population.

If you have to load in an infested area, go to an area parking lot, a shopping center parking lot, and go through your vehicle where you are away from an actively moving population before you go to a region where spotted lanternflies don't occur yet.

And if you do see them, report them.

You can do that with the PennState Extension website.

It's very easy, go right on there, at extension.psu.edu, and especially if you see them in an area where they're not known to occur yet.

And one of the big questions that keeps coming up is cantharidin.

Cantharidin is that toxic compound found in blister beetles, that is incredibly toxic to horses.

I felt this appropriate for the day, for the talk, and misinformation, the fifth horseman of the apocalypse.

Unfortunately, this has been persistent.

Do they contain cantharidin? No.

Well, this is an article from an agricultural catalog, right?

And suspected pests might release cantharidian.

No.

Unfortunately, Missouri Extension, "Do not kill it.

The insect contains cantharidin," the same chemicals found in a blister beetle." No.

New Jersey Department of Agriculture.

No, they've not been known to be toxic to domestic animals.

If these insects contained cantharidin, I would not be here.

I've squished so many of these things, my hands would have fallen off, okay?

And back to that one, I say mostly on that, well there's a little bit of a thing there where it says, "Toxic metabolites from tree of heaven," so we're gonna say mostly on that.

And the reason I say mostly is we do think that there is some sequestration of toxic alkaloids from tree of heaven, Ailanthus, and walnuts, and that may be, what's making them bitter to birds, why birds won't eat them, but to date, no domestic animals, no wild animals have been seen to be killed by spotted lanternfly, or feeding on spotted lanternfly, or anything like that.

And I've heard stories of, "My dog was eating them and threw up, " and I don't argue with that.

My dogs eat grass and throw up.

Is it because the lanternfly upset their stomach?

Possibly.

Did it kill them?

No, your dog didn't die from them.

Is it bitter? Is it nasty?

Yeah, it's possible, but it's not killing these animals.

And so to that point about, oh, you know, if they get caught up in alfalfa, or if they get caught up in balers, it's possible.

It's possible that nymphs are getting caught up.

For the most part, the adults get out of the way.

I rode on a corn harvester last year while we were doing transects through giant cornfields, and those insects get out of the way of the harvester.

Is there are some that make it through?

Probably, but it hasn't been a problem.

We've seen this now for six years.

It's just not materialized.

And so for my research in 2019, this number of 36,975 adults sexed, that means literally flipping them over and checking male and female.

Of that number, I did approximately 25,000, and the techs that I worked with did the other 10,000.

I would not have hands if they had cantharidin, and were producing that toxin in them, so we can put that to rest.

And with that, Laura, we have our first quiz.

- [Laura] All right, so you should see a box popped up on the screen with some quiz questions.

If anybody doesn't see it, you can let me know in the chat, but it should be up.

There's five questions for you to answer, and it's just a review of what we've talked about so far.

I'll give you guys a minute or so.

- Some good answers coming in here for the next section coming up.

Everybody got the message about cantharidin, but the toxicity scale, hm.

- [Laura] Haven't covered that one quite yet.

- No, we haven't, but this is good.

We've got some savvy folks here that've done some homework here.

(Laura chuckles)

- [Laura] Wanna give it 10 more seconds?

- [Brian] Okay.

- [Laura] All right, we'll end the poll here.

I can share the answers if you want to go through the correct answers.

- Okay, so do they contain, oh, did somebody said yes on the cantharidin?

Really?

(Laura laughing)

All right, no, the answer is no on that.

"On the EPA acute toxicity scale, the higher the rating, the safer the product." That is actually true.

And we're gonna get to that in a minute.

The lower the number, the more dangerous it is.

If it's a number one, you don't wanna be handling it.

So we'll get to that in a little bit.

"SLF can't fly well, more of a hop and glide." True or false?

I'm actually gonna say false.

They don't always fly often, they're not the strongest of fliers, they're not agile, but they can fly very far and very well, so we'll get into that.

"Ailanthus altissima is a preferred host, but not necessary for its survival." That is absolutely true, and I'm gonna show you some proof of that that took some time to figure out.

So final one, big jumps, absolutely true.

Big jumps have almost certainly been human-assisted movements.

Pretty cool, all right, so let's move on here.

- [Laura] You should just be able to X out of the survey results and keep moving.

- All right, do, do.

Okay, so what should you do?

Well, first thing to do is get informed, get informed with good information.

If it's gonna be from somebody's friend's brother's uncle, then it's not the best information.

Our website is always up.

There's, right when you log in, "Learn how to slow the spread," there's a big banner right across the landing page for the PennState Extension website, and we have just a plethora of information there, and we're constantly working to update it and keep it current.

So the other thing you should do is develop a plan.

If you have plants that you know are gonna be hosts, if you don't have it yet, develop a plan.

If you have lanternflies already, develop a plan, and reevaluate.

Use the options timeline for it, depending on the time of the year, use the steps of management from cultural control, just removing favorite hosts, all the way up to chemical control options, right?

Don't go right for the big guns with the chemicals.

It may not be necessary.

In terms of making decisions, there's a great chart there that Amy Korman and Emelie Swackhamer developed, and you can ask yourself those questions, are your trees at high risk?

Is your property at high risk or low risk?

But there's no one silver bullet for spotted lanternfly, there's no one size fits all, and so I would encourage you to take the time to go through with our website, with the new management guide and make informed decisions.

As far as Ailanthus, is it necessary?

Well, originally it was thought to be, these are some control plots that we'd set up in 2018, and some of those cages have Ailanthus trees in and some don't.

And one of the most annoying and obnoxious things about spotlight lanternflies is they are very, very difficult to keep alive in captivity.

It took us several seasons of just learning how to keep them alive in captivity so that we could study them, simply because they are such voracious feeders.

We finally have to rotate new plant material on all the time or in this case, those are 10-foot-high cages.

Those trees have to be pretty big just to sustain them.

And so over time, in 2019, in those cages, we saw that we had, X produced 46 egg masses in the cages with Ailanthus, and six without.

In 2020, the numbers were a little bit higher, the trees were a little bit more established, 96 egg masses versus 14 without Ailanthus.

And so there is about a seven fold increase of eggs produced when they have exposure to Ailanthus.

Ailanthus, however, I will caution that that is a very set number of plants that are in those enclosures, and not necessarily representative of everything they would find out in the environment.

But what we did see in it as enclosures is that nymphs developed faster to fourth instars with Ailanthus, they developed faster to adults, and those eggs that were laid, whether or not they had Ailanthus in the diet, the parents, it didn't really have much impact on survival or development over time, so it was only the development of those insects, but didn't carry through to the next generation.

Is Ailanthus necessary?

No, it's absolutely not.

Ailanthus is an invasive first brought here in the 1700.

Its ground zero was in Philadelphia, so there's a lot of it around, especially in our region, but it's an important component and it can be important to use it for control if you're gonna use insecticides, okay?

Trying to eliminate all the Ailanthus in our country is not feasible, it's not cost-effective, one can't do it in a short enough time to impact the spread of lanternfly at this point.

However, there's no real downside to getting rid of another invasive species.

And can we still eliminate it?

No, this is the spread of Ailanthus for our country, and so it's a pretty big job to try and do it.

If you do wanna deal with the Ailanthus, if you have it on your property, if you have it near your pastures, on our website, right there with the spotted lanternfly information, you can learn all about managing tree of heaven, and it really does take a herbicide to do it effectively, so that they don't come right back.

Tree of heaven, Ailanthus, it's a freak tree, cut it down and it just makes it angry.

Those roots will re-sprout.

In terms of management, you can trap.

There's different traps.

The first thing that became popular was the sticky bands, and you can see the bottom left there, just the giant flypaper, and they can catch a lot of lanternflies, especially nymphs, the adults tend to just hop over, but they also catch a lot of wildlife.

You can catch squirrels, you can catch birds, you can catch all kinds of things like that that we don't wanna kill, and you're not actually really reducing the population.

So is it worth it?

I would say no.

It's a good thing for us, for monitoring.

If you wanna kill them, it's a good thing to kill lanternflies, please don't use sticky paper or sticky-traps flypaper without having a barrier over it like you see in this picture.

Even with the chicken wire, we get a lot of non-target insects, the good insects in there.

A better way to do it is the modified circle traps.

You can find directions how to make these on our website, and what they do is just generally funnel them up.

You can use a plastic bag to catch them and kill them in.

And there are commercial barriers available, sticky barriers that the sticky part actually faces inward and don't catch near as many non targets, so there are better ways to do it.

If you're gonna use insecticides, read the entire label.

Don't just grab something off the shelf, and at the local hardware store or the local feed store, don't just grab something off the shelf and take it and try and use it if you don't understand what the label says and how to use it.

Every insecticide has a label and it has a corresponding SDS sheet, and SDS simply stands for Safety Data Sheet.

I just happened to pick Zylam out here.

Zylam is a dinotefuran product, neonic, not generally used in horse pastures.

It's more of an ornamental use.

And with those labels, it's very, very important to understand that the label is the law in Pennsylvania.

If it says do something on a label, you must do it.

If it says do not, you cannot do it in Pennsylvania.

And so these two pieces of paper go together hand in hand.

Every insecticide has a label attached to it.

You may have to peel it open.

For a blow up there, it tells you right on the front.

It tells you your percentage of active ingredient, in this case dinotefuran, it has a word that's gonna be caution, or danger, or warning.

And the higher the danger, that's the most toxic.

And so we encourage with lanternflies to use the least toxic first.

You can find those in our management guide.

As I said, these things die so, so easily.

Unfortunately they die when we're trying to keep them alive, and yet they persist so well in our environment.

Very, very, almost benign products like insecticidal soap are very effective at killing them if you use them right.

And so try and make that decision to use the least toxic first.

Within the SDS sheet, it will have revisions, dates of issue revisions, make sure you're using the proper revision, the most current, and you're gonna see hazards identification, you're gonna see acute oral toxicity categories, carcinogenics, and you're gonna see all kinds of information that's in that safety data sheet that tells you all about that product that you're holding in your hand.

And so what does EPA toxicity categories mean?

It's actually quite the opposite of what everybody was thinking.

Category I is the highest toxicity, so up to and including 50 milligrams per kilogram of ingestion is gonna kill 50% of the population that ingests it orally, and that's what we call the LD50.

And so literally taken, that'd mean if you took a hundred people, and you took them by weight, and you fed them 50 milligrams, in this example of a category one, 50 milligrams per kilogram of body weight, 50% of the people would die.

That's not very much.

When you go up through the category II, 50 through 500, category three, the lower toxicity, 500 through 5,000, category four is very, very low toxicity.

It takes more than 5,000 milligrams per kilogram of body weight to kill 50% of the population.

So you can see it's done by oral, by dermal, inhalation, and then there's other label names here that are for eye irritation and skin irritation.

Corrosive, irreversible destruction of ocular tissue, means you don't get a second chance, all the way up to minimal effects clearing in less than 24 hours, okay?

This doesn't mean minimal effects that you shouldn't wear eye protection.

Skin irritation doesn't mean that you should not have gloves on or wear the proper personal protective PPE equipment.

What it means is if there is a mistake made, it's not gonna be, most likely, long-term and irreversible.

At the lower end there, the category I, it is irreversible damage, so these are things to understand when you're reading those labels.

As I said, with those LD50s, in this case, we took some of the products that are most commonly used for spotted lanternfly, dinotefuran, the neonic, is a very commonly used one.

Imidacloprid, that's a very common one.

Think BAYER Tree, Advanced tree.

It used to be BAYER, now it's BIOADVANCED.

BAYER sold off their imidacloprid line.

You can buy just generic QUALI-PRO imidacloprid, bifenthrin.

Bifenthrin is a pyrethroid.

It's a shorter residual where the neonoics can last, in some cases with imidacloprid, for six to seven years, depending on the application and the rate that's used.

Bifenthrin is a very short residual, two to three weeks generally, and then a quick breakdown.

Beta-cyfluthrin, same thing, another pyrethroid, quick breakdown.

Does that mean it's safer?

Well, when you take those numbers and you break them down, and you look at the percent of A.I.

and you look at the acute toxicity rating, well, they may all be threes and fours, okay, so not overly, overly toxic, but there's a pretty big range there.

That Talstar Professional bifenthrin, 632 milligrams per kilogram versus 5,000 on that Transtect dinotefuran.

And so what does that mean when you weigh that out to, say, a horse, right?

A thousand-pound horse is gonna weigh approximately 453.6 kilograms, and so we'll just use that as a reference.

And so how many milligrams of product per that horse?

Well, it takes with the Transtect 200, excuse me, 2,268,000 milligrams of the product to kill that horse, 50% of the population of those horses.

With that Talstar, we're down to 286,000, right?

So in that unit of how that material's purchased in one gallon, it only takes that much of that gallon, that 0.07 gallons, to kill 50% of the population of horses that might ingest it, whereas the package of that Transtect, it would take 6.6 packages complete of it being ingested to kill the horse.

So just because it's a shorter acting active ingredient, doesn't mean it's necessarily safer in the acute toxicity range.

So don't think just because it's faster acting and has less residual, that it is necessarily safer.

Just because it's sold over the counter at a hardware store versus something like Zylam that you would buy from a commercial pesticide supplier, don't think it's necessarily safer in terms of acute toxicity.

You need to read the label and understand the label.

And so going back to that SDS sheet, if you're concerned with what's always the next question, what about sub lethal doses and chronic exposure?

And these are very, very important questions to ask because acute means just that one time exposure, but sub-lethal chronic exposure can be every bit as bad or worse if the materials are not handled carefully.

And most of these things you can find out right on the SDS sheet.

And so you see this specific target organ, specific target organ, I always lose the last one, toxin, hm, maybe, but this means what is specifically affected by this insecticide.

And with bifenthrin it's the central nervous system, all right?

Target organ, affects central nervous system.

And you look at chronic toxicity, long-term exposure can cause neurotoxicity, tremors and impaired gait in the early exposure in animal studies, but tremors disappeared with continued exposure.

I'm guessing that the continued exposure does not make things better.

It's just that the tremors disappeared.

And so carcinogenicy, when we look at this, treatment related urinary bladder benign tumors, lesions, in male mice only at the highest dose test, it gives me enough concern that I don't wanna have chronic exposure, neurological effects.

And so all this information is available in the SDS sheet.

SDS sheets should be made available anywhere you can buy this chemical.

They're required to be made available.

And this is, I'm just using bifenthrin as an example, all this material is available on the internet.

You can make sure, from the manufacturer, make sure you're using the current publication with the most up-to-date information.

It's all there, and so if you choose to use an insecticide, lanternflies are very, very easy to kill.

Start with the least toxic product, do what you wanna do according to your management plan.

Read the entire label, make sure you're using a product registered for the site you're using it on, and that means, and this is important because in Pennsylvania, this is the law, if the product is not registered for crop land, you may not use that product on crop land.

If it is not registered for residential, you may not use it in a residential setting.

And the reason is because it has not been tested for that type of use and what the effects may be.

You need to follow the label rate, don't go under, you can use the minimum on a label, but don't go beneath because that's how we can create resistance in insects and pests, you need to follow the interval restrictions, use the personal protective equipment listed, and if you aren't sure about any of this stuff, we have all kinds of good information on our website, but if you aren't sure, get help.

We have an entire extension service, or hire a licensed professional.

In the state of Pennsylvania, in order to apply an insecticide or any pesticide on somebody else's property, you need to be licensed with the state, which means you have passed certain tests that show that you know how to do this.

Okay, so getting in quick on time, just a couple of other things to know about lanternflies.

This is a site that we have monitored for several years now.

This is last year.

You can see early in the nymphs season, what we call the above eight by eight.

We look at these trees.

This is a site with 50 red maples lining both sides of an entrance avenue, and you can see that we monitored in the spring, in June, we were counting up about 1600 nymphs on one visit, and that population just dropped, plummeted.

By 4th of July, we were down to nothing all the way through August.

And all of a sudden we started to see this slight uptick.

And by the end of September, all of a sudden the numbers on that site skyrocketed, and really was shocking, even to us.

We expected something like this where they would come into these maples, and these numbers were amazing.

So in a two-week period there, this site saw the jump from 509 to 16,400 adults across all 50 trees monitored.

These are physically counted.

And what's more amazing is that this is a pesticide trial site, and we killed approximately 9,500 in that same time period.

Add that up, and in that two-week period, we saw a jump of approximately 26,000 insects came into that site, and this is that part where people freak out.

All of a sudden lanternflies can just massively show up in sudden numbers and people freak out, they reach for things they shouldn't, like kerosene, or blow torches, or things like that.

What's more amazing is that that's right where the egg-laying period started.

Like I said, with the equinox on this site, this is where we saw the eggs laid, right?

When they came in, they deposited their eggs and then they died.

And so in terms of managing, it's problematic, it's challenging.

We're working on it, we're working on it, we're working on it, but we have a long ways to go.

In terms of coming up with a more of an area-wide approach, it's gonna give us better control.

Are they capable of flying long distances?

Most of you got this wrong.

So at this site, these are those 50 trees I was just talking about, we watched them flying in here.

That's a quarter mile, no problem.

They are not agile fliers like a dragon fly.

They can not shift midair.

They're more like a moth, but they do flap their wings furiously.

In the fall, when there's billionaire, when there's warm ground, rising thermals, they catch this thermals and off they go.

And this is a quarry in Bechtelsville, Pennsylvania.

This point here, there's an asphalt plant with a tower up on top of the plant.

I stood on that catwalk and watched lanternflies coming from across that quarry pit for tenths of a mile, and some of them were going right overhead, still 50 feet above the tower.

So if they're capable of doing that roughly for tenths to half a mile in one flight, you can imagine how far they can go with a couple of flights like that, and so, yes, they are capable of flying very long distances.

They're pretty good flyers.

They're not strong fliers.

They tend to get blown with the wind, more like a moth, but we see there's flights in August and September, and judging by that consistent yearly spread, we think that their natural spread is that about seven and a half miles per year, and that was that yellow circle I showed you on the map.

So here comes the next quiz.

Go ahead and answer them.

And Laura, do we have any, I can't see questions in the chat.

Do we have any questions to go through?

- [Laura] I have not seen any questions pop up yet.

- None at all, all right. - [Laura] Nope.

Well, I was either thorough or I put you all to sleep.

(Laura laughing)

- [Laura] If anyone has any questions once you finish your poll here, feel free to type them in and we'll try to get to them.

- All right, looks like we're doing a little better on this set.

(Laura chuckles)

Yeah, nothing kills a SLF.

Yeah, as Amy Korman likes to say, "Everything kills SLF, even a frown." Look at them wrong and they'll die on you, especially when you're trying to keep them alive.

(Laura laughing)

- [Laura] Well, they're really good at evading flyswatters, I've found.

- They are.

Yeah, sometimes if you let them jump two or three times, they kind of get tired out.

Then when they give up, you get them on the fourth shot, so yeah.

Ooh, somebody's having fun here with us.

All right, for the most part, everybody did really good on this quiz here, so.

- [Laura] Okay, we can end it if you wanna go through the answers.

- All right, "SLF is killing trees everywhere." Absolutely false.

They're not killing trees beyond the tree of heaven, the Ailanthus.

I didn't get into grapes.

Grapes are absolutely impacted, and grapes are killed by this insect.

Pennsylvania has a very big grape industry in the Erie region.

We're the fourth largest producer of grapes in the country.

In our vineyards, in the eastern half of the state where lanternfly has been for a while, this is actually pretty devastating, requires a lot more application of insecticide, and even with that, yields are down and it's problematic to keep them out of the harvested grapes.

That's a whole different conversation than what we're talking about today, but understand that lanternflies, while being a nuisance for most people, for some industries are absolutely a problem.

"It's okay to use any insecticide with the active ingredient that is known to be effective, even if the site being used on is not listed on the label." Absolutely, you cannot do that.

It must be on that label.

So most of you got it right, except the one wise guy out there.

So it seems to be a theme.

The "Oral LD50 means the amount of active ingredient in a product needed to be ingested, as a ratio of milligrams of active ingredient," actually it should be product, "To kilogram weight of the animal or person ingesting it to kill 50% of a similar population." Absolutely, that's what that LD50 means.

"Nothing kills lanternfly." False, everything kills lanternfly, and go for the least toxic first, and if you need the longer-acting, and part of what you're trying to accomplish, then use the longer-acting.

"Pesticide with short-acting residuals are not always safer that those with long acting-residuals." That is absolutely true, especially when we talk about the acute properties of it.

Chronic is a different story.

Some of those juries are still out.

Some of those questions are not really well answered and are being studied, but yup, there we go, so much better.

And so with that, these are the thank yous to make all this stuff possible.

This top row here, Josh, Kendal, Liz, Lauren, John Rost, they are amazing technicians that literally sit there and count bugs with us, and they do this, and they're fantastic technicians that we could not do this work without.

And you can see all the research team, Department of Ag, USDA, and PDA at PennState has been funding this research, try and get us where we need to be, and all these great businesses down here that either give us land or not give us, but donate, use of land for research, we couldn't do it without all that assistance.

So with that, we'll go to questions.

This is an assassin bug, wheel bug, using its piercing, sucking mouth parts to make a juice box out of an adult lanternfly.

There are lots of natural predators out there that will kill them.

And so there we are.

I see your questions coming in now.

- [Laura] Yes, wonderful. Thank you so much.

We do have a couple of questions that have come in.

It's about 12:58, so we'll probably go over by a minute or two, just to answer all the questions.

If anybody's thinking about heading out, please remember to fill out our survey.

It should pop up automatically when you leave the webinar if you're on a computer, but if not, there's a link in the chat box.

All right, our first question is, "How do you recommend informing other people about this?" - Do your best.

If you see, if you see somebody in a park, if you're on trails, anything like that, if you see lanternflies and it seems like the person is unaware, especially they're out of state, make sure that you say something to them about not taking them with them, but do what you can.

There's a lot of public outreach.

If somebody is unaware, then just go ahead and tell them, start the conversation, yeah.

- [Laura] All right, "Do you think there's a reason they prefer the tree of heaven?" - Well, the one thought is the toxic alkaloids.

If they're sequestering those toxic alkaloids for protection, like monarchs do with milkweed, then it makes a lot of sense.

We also know that tree of heaven is a bit of a freak tree.

It has a fantastic root system that is able to store just tons and tons of both water and starches and sugars, and so the way it grows very fast, its vascular system is like a fire hose for these insects to drink from.

And so it may be just so much as they're getting more from that than trying to feed on a denser plant, like an oak tree 'cause it's more difficult to get a meal from.

So yeah, we're not entirely sure, but there are a number of reasons that they might be doing it.

- [Laura] Okay, "Does it matter if they're going after the tree of heaven, since they're both invasive species?" - No, I mean, where they're being killed, it's a mixed blessing, right?

We have these trees that are invasive that we don't want, that are being killed, and so they're kind of doing us a little bit of a benefit there.

Unfortunately, they're not well-trained enough to stay only on the tree of heaven, so the downside is when they're done with that meal, they may be moving on to your maple tree or your willow tree that hangs over your deck, and then coats it in honeydew, and then mold.

So it's a mixed bag, unfortunately.

- [Laura] Yeah, all right, our last question so far, if anyone has any more questions, feel free to type them out, "Is trying to stop and kill the lanternflies even worth it at this point?" - Hmm, that's a great question.

So from the point of view of, are you gonna have an impact by treating all your trees?

Not in the greater population.

If you are a vineyard grower, absolutely.

There is a reason that you want these things dead and you don't want them on your property.

If you own a restaurant, you don't want them on the deck stopping people from enjoying a meal, right?

So there are times when it's absolutely worth trying to kill it, especially when we get into the travel areas where there's a higher risk of movement, be it airports, or train yards, rail yards, yes, because we don't wanna spread this, say, to California, and think about the grape industry in Napa valley.

So we do have our part to do with that.

As I've been stressing here, don't get frantic about it.

Don't drive yourself insane with it.

I have one friend, she's literally out on the roof of her garage trying to kill them 'cause she's just absolutely adamant that she's gonna make the difference, and that that's the far extreme.

Is it worth it?

If they're not a big problem, no.

This goes down to that management, and what it means, where you're at, and what you need to accomplish.

To us that have been living with this for so long, population's actually down a little bit here, quite a bit this year, and hopefully that's a good sign of things to come.

They may come roaring back. We don't know.

Do I go out and kill them every day? No.

If I see them, yeah, I kill them.

Do I make it a point to do it?

No, but I do make it a point not to take them with me somewhere else.

If we're leaving on a trip, things like that, do your part to not move it around.

And so that's the best answer I can give you with that.

- [Laura] Yeah, great.

We have one final note, it looks like.

Someone says that five minutes before this started, they got an Audubon Society message about the lanternfly, which noted that cardinals, titmice, and bluejays are eating them.

Citizen scientists are reporting this, and a PennState PhD candidate, Anne Johnson, has compiled 660 predation occurrences.

- Yep, so Ann's awesome.

I worked with her a lot last summer.

And this goes back to that question of are they sequestering?

Is there a bittering agent that they're sequestering?

What I can tell you is that birds, far and away, left them alone for a long time.

And so we keep chickens at our house, and domestic chickens will eat just about anything.

They're almost as smart as bowling balls, and yet our domestic chickens learned to avoid them.

We would throw lanternflies in, they would take a look and run the other way.

So for our bowling-ball-smart chickens to learn to avoid them, tells me there's something there that they don't want.

Now, other people tell me that their chickens love them just fine, and maybe their chickens are getting a population that hasn't been exposed to those alkaloids.

We don't know.

I can tell you that Anne is actually working on this.

She's gonna be following up with a South Korean paper where they looked at birds, and feeding them intentionally to birds, and whether or not the insects that have been intentionally fed have fed on tree of heaven, so there's more to come with this.

The only thing I'm gonna say is that 660 predation occurrences is a pretty low number, given 37 counties of Pennsylvania with lanternflies and the number of birds out there, so I'm not denying that some birds will eat them, I just wonder why the number is so low, yeah.

- [Laura] Hmm, very interesting.

- Yeah.

- [Laura] All right, well that is it for our questions, as far as I can see.

So with that, I guess we'll wrap it up.

For anyone who's still on, thank you so much for joining us today.

Make sure to follow us on Facebook and sign up for our email list.

If you have a minute to fill out our evaluation, we would greatly appreciate that, and thank you for coming today.