Spotted Lanternfly Past, Present, and Future: Impacts and Management

- Welcome everyone to today's webinar.

Really appreciate everyone joining us.

My name's Cane Hickey and I'm the Viticulture Extension Educator at Penn State.

And along with my panelists here today, I'll be moderating the webinar.

And this slide is a reminder or a reminder for me to tell you all that we will record this and share this.

So if you registered for this, which is most of you 'cause you're here, but even for those that don't attend a live webinar, we will record this and send this, email this out and we'll post it on our website.

So some logistics, if you have questions, please type them in the chat.

You can also use the Q&A function if you wish to do that.

And what we'll do is we'll monitor those questions and we will ask them to Julie at the end of the presentation, okay?

So after the presentation is when we will address those, but I would encourage you that you don't have to wait until the end to ask questions.

Please type them as they may arise.

So today, the title of our webinar is "Spotted Lanternfly Past, Present, and Future: Impacts and Management" and we have the Spotted Lanternfly Guru with us today.

Thank you so much, Dr. Julie Urban, Associate Research Professor in the Department of Entomology and the College of Agricultural Sciences at Penn State.

Thanks for being here and doing us this favor, Julie.

I do wanna call attention to a grant that several of us are working on.

Dr. Claudia Schmidt, who's one of our panelists today is the Project Director and a Co-Project Director (faintly speaking)

And so in this effort, and I've listed the other team members here.

And so this project is a Northeast Extension Risk Management Education grant that we were awarded, and the title is here, Spotted Lanternfly Risk Management Education for Grape Growers in the Northeast.

And so this webinar is one of the objectives of this grant.

And another objective of this grant is to track spotted lanternfly.

And this QR code here, if you scan, it will take you to the survey.

And the goal of this survey is to allow us to track spotted lanternfly on a consistent and hopefully, frequent basis, throughout the growing season this year.

And so this map that Claudia sent me earlier today is a map that shows you, it's a map generated by the survey and each one of these dots represents a location where spotted lanternfly exist.

And so we're hoping that we folks stay engaged with this and take this survey and we encourage, we will send biweekly updates and at that time when we send those updates, we would, we'll put the survey link in there and we just ask folks to give us this, the current status on a weekly basis.

So again, this is one of the grant objectives of that grant that I just mentioned.

So thank you in advance for your feedback on this.

I will also post this survey link, which is contained in a news article that explains a little bit more about the goals of the survey.

So I will post that as soon as I stop sharing my screen and let Julie begin.

And I think that is about it for my introduction.

And again, I just wanna thank everyone so much for being here and thanks in advance for taking our survey and helping us with feedback with that.

So Julie, thank you so much for doing us this favor and giving us this presentation.

So I'll stop sharing and let you take it over.

- Great, thanks Cane.

Thanks everyone for being here.

And I am so excited that you all are doing that survey and I think that when you, with some of the work and issues that I present to you today, I think that'll make clear why it's so important that we have data like Cane and the team are, and Claudia and the team are collecting for the survey because I think improved management of lanternfly is going to happen if we broaden our geographic scope a bit.

Okay, so, but anyway, I'm here today to talk with you about Spotted lanternfly.

So the title is "Past, Present, and Future." I'll give you an update of some new things that are on the horizon, but I just kind of wanted to give a brief history of the lanternfly invasion.

I saw, I recognized it in the names of a lot of you.

So some of you might have heard this before, but if you're new to lanternfly, just wanna bring you up to speed on how we got to where we are and then talk about its impacts and its biology to try to understand why it's so challenging of a pest to control.

And then in terms of future, talk about current steps in research and future directions, where we're going and what this looks like and again, why we see the need for this survey.

Okay, so to start off, spotted lanternfly is a plant hopper.

Its mouth parts are fused into a straw-like beak.

And here you can see this is a female.

We have her little red valvili at the end, if it were a male, they'd be black.

And planthoppers keep their beaks along their abdomen and they insert those mouth parts into plants to feed on the plant saps, specifically the phloem.

So here you can see her with her mouth parts in action.

And one of the reasons spotted lanternflies are so problematic is that they have over 100 different plant and tree species that they've been recorded feeding upon.

Those are plants and trees found in North America.

And so they feed on essentially just about anything, anything but conifers to date.

And so how did they get here?

Well, lanternflies are thought to have gotten here on a shipment of stone from Asia, most likely China from records as eggs.

And so spotted lanternfly is a member of the plant harbor family Fulgoridae.

And that's a family of about 500 species.

Most of them are found in tropical regions of the world.

This particular species, Lycorma delicatula is kind of unusual in inhabiting such temperate climates.

But this species and other species as well of lanternflies in that family Fulgoridae are unusual.

They lay their eggs on essentially anything.

And this is unusual for a planthopper or really any Hemiptera that's a plant feeder because when the eggs hatch, the nymphs don't have wings and so they can't disperse as far as adults and so typically, Hemipteran insects lay their eggs on a host plant where, you know, when the baby's hatched, they're able to feed.

But lanternflies don't do that.

They'll lay their eggs on essentially anything.

And that's kind of why they're able to get away with that is likely because they feed so broadly and they really do disperse a lot farther than we've really measured well to date.

And so anyway, this...

Basically a lanternfly was first detected in the US in Berks County in Eastern Pennsylvania on September 22nd, 2014.

And basically, we knew what we were in for kind of when that call came in.

And so basically, spotted lanternfly was an invasive that in South Korea in 2004.

And there it was reported to be a pest of tree fruit, stone fruit, ornamental and timber trees, but most notably grape.

And so USDA APHIS and States Department of Agriculture were really on the look out for it from that time.

And so within a, you know, immediately, Pennsylvania Department of Ag went out, confirmed what it was, and subsequent inspections of that area found that it was a single introduction at this stone yard where they imported stone for landscaping.

And by talking to the workers there and by doing surveys, they found old egg masses.

The workers reported seeing these things jumping around the year before.

So they were there at least one to two years prior to their detection.

And so you can see, lanternfly egg masses, they're really hard to see, they're hard to see on a tree, but you could imagine on a shipment of stone, on the stone itself or on the pallet, they're kind of invisible to inspectors.

And so that's one of the reasons that lanternfly is such a good invasive, its egg mess can be transported really anywhere.

And one of the other things that makes it so problematic is that while it feeds so widely on a different range of hosts, one of its preferred hosts is from its native range, Ailanthus altissima or Tree-of-Heaven.

And so Tree-of-Heaven is an introduced invasive here in the United States.

It was introduced in the late 1700s and here you can see it and it grows in highly human disturbed habitats.

And so that makes it pretty challenging because it grows along railroad lines and highways, and those are disturbed areas and essentially those are transportation corridors that allow lanternfly to spread.

The other thing that's challenging with Tree-of-Heaven is that if you cut it off, it can still sprout new growth and it sends suckers out underground.

So cutting it down essentially really only serves to stimulate its growth.

So it's really challenging to remove.

And so when lanternfly was first detected in 2014, within less than a month, Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture and USDA APHIS imposed a quarantine and they quarantined at that time these handful of six yellow townships, that's the extent of the infestation, and they put those under quarantine to restrict movement of any goods or vehicles with lanternfly on it.

And then each year, Pennsylvania Department of Ag, they performed treatments, but they also did surveys.

And you can see that they expanded to include a few more townships in 2015 and then a bit more in 2016 and then expanded it and went to calling full counties because by calling townships, a lot of the townships had similar names.

But you can see by 2017, you know, lanternfly was still in the southeastern region of Pennsylvania.

Now this is where it is, this is at a great map.

I saw Brian Eshenaur online who is in charge of organizing this map for our community at northeast, at New York State IPM.

And so this is the latest, greatest updated distribution.

The blue counties are those under quarantine, and actually, you can see the internal state quarantine areas in red, but basically, those are counties where known lanternfly established populations occur.

And so you can see, it's expanded to be in 16 states.

The other thing to note on this map is that there's these purple dots.

And purple dots are places where lanternfly has been detected, but with subsequent surveys, known population was established.

And so you can see down here into North Carolina, up into New England, spotted lanternfly is a really good hitchhiker.

And also, while it's not shown on this map, spotted lanternfly has shown up on air cargo flights multiple, multiple times in California, not just last year, but in multiple years as well as in Oregon and Washington.

And so certainly grape-growing folks out in Western US are concerned.

If you look at this map, kind of where we are now is we don't have, if you look, think about important grape areas here in the Northeast, it's in a lot of vineyards.

It is not yet in Erie County, but certainly we're concerned because it's all around it.

And it's also right now, although to date, last I've heard, we don't have reports in vineyards in the Finger Lakes or in Long Island, but certainly it's established in counties there.

So we're really interested, again, here's the importance of the survey.

We really wanna know what you're seeing, especially in terms of lanternfly getting into some of these additional vineyard areas.

And so I started working on lanternfly in 2014, USDA pulled together a group of scientists on a technical working group to help advise.

And I wasn't working at Penn State at the time and so we came in and offered advice, and then I had the opportunity to come to Penn State in 2016 and we did work.

And 2017 was really when we saw the ball game change.

And so this is, I had a student who is working on her, doing her research on insecticide efficacy at an infested vineyard in Eastern Pennsylvania.

And in February, March of 2017, we rode around in that vineyard looking for which rows did we want to do our treatments on.

We rode around with the owner and we saw this site and this really freaked us out because even though lanternfly had been at this vineyard, it really wasn't in very high numbers.

And we saw post after post, this is, you can't tell what it is, it's a post that's supporting vines in this vineyard.

And post after post was covered with egg masses.

And then later this year, later that year, this is that same vineyard.

And this is a video that my student took that really showed such heavy infestation on grapes.

And many of you have seen this before, but if you haven't, you'll notice those, the water dripping, and actually that's not water dripping, that's lanternfly excrement or it's nicer if we call it honeydew.

And you can see they're just shooting the honeydew out.

It's coating the leaves and coating the other insects.

And basically, what that's also showing you is that lanternfly really is feeding voraciously, especially as adults.

What was interesting and kind of still not fully explained is that with lanternfly in South Korea, the biggest impacts were to grapes, but the biggest impacts weren't from lanternfly feeding damage, it was from a sooty mold, and I'll show you in a few slides that feeds on the honeydew excrement and it would block in photosynthesis in the leaves.

And basically, that was the biggest economic impact to grape in South Korea.

But although we're seeing some sooty molded vineyards in the Northeast in the US, we don't see the sooty mold damage here that they saw in South Korea.

And so I'd be interested in some of your thoughts about why that might be the case.

The other thing that really freaked us out in 2017 is that it moved on to other fruits.

So this particular grower had 40 acres of grapes and next to it was an apple orchard.

And again, my student had been doing...

Hi, little buddy.

My student had been doing research at this site for multiple years and they were never in the apples.

And then in 2017, this was September 11, and they moved into apples.

And as they were fee...

As they were, you know, inundating those apple trees, they were feeding.

Starting like we saw economic impact starting in 2016.

And so even though these are kind of out of date records, this damage is consistent with what we're seeing today.

And so we see some yield loss and some death, but basically, in addition to feeding damage to the actual vines, what we're also seeing is economic impact due to increased insecticide applications, a tripling of applications with a tripling of associated costs.

And so basically, lanternfly feeding in addition to other things impacting a vineyard are where we see problems.

But we saw this is what that vineyard where my student did her work looked like by May of 2019.

This is another vineyard where we continue to work outside of Allentown.

And again, you can see damage to the grapevines here.

I'll come back to this vineyard because this is really an interesting site where we've continued to do research.

It's a lovely vineyard and I think it kind of shows some of the problems we have with studying spotted lanternfly.

But anyway, so what we're learning through work that Michela Centinari and her team have led on grapevines, but also some work that Kelli Hoover at Penn State has done on ornamentals, we're seeing that grapes and Tree-of-Heaven respond differently to lanternfly feeding than other ornamentals and tree fruit.

So what we're seeing are the biggest impacts in terms of feeding lanternfly feeding is, you know, does a number on grapes and Tree-of-Heaven and these species aren't able to really turn on their defenses like ornamental trees can.

What we also see, okay, so in that particular study that I mentioned, I'll describe that to you that Michela led, but additional work in terms of looking at impacts of lanternfly feeding on grapevines, I wanted to be sure to mention that Michela and Flor Acevedo are also looking at establishing damage thresholds for lanternfly feeding on grapes at the FREC station in Biglerville.

And so more to come on that, but in terms of this multi-year study on looking at impacts of feeding, what Michela's team did is they enclosed in situ grapevines, introduced varying densities of lanternfly and basically allowed them to feed for four days and then removed everybody, you know, simulating what if a vine were treated with insecticide.

And they did this for multiple years and then took a variety of indicators of plant physiology.

And basically, what they found is that with having an extensive lanternfly feeding, this reduces accumulation of sugars and nitrogen and decreases vine capability to produce sugar.

And so this can have downstream effects on vine health as well.

So this is a really great and thorough study that kind of shows how detrimental lanternfly feeding can be to grapes.

And so what was interesting is that even though lanternfly was reported to damage tree fruit in South Korea, despite these horrible numbers that we saw, we've not gotten any reports of damage in apple or in stone fruit.

And so lanternfly will come in, feed for a bit, but they don't really hang around.

And so fortunately, we're not seeing the economic impacts there.

And when we followed up with folks in South Korea, entomologists who had done work there, they admitted that feeding damage wasn't quantified on these other tree crops in South Korea.

And so we kind of dodged a bullet in a sense, at least so far.

(sighs) Lanternflies feed on a lot of different things.

And so here you see them on maples.

And so this freaks people out, right?

So I'm sure, basically, this isn't great for trees, but this kind of feeding does not kill fruit trees or ornamentals, but it certainly makes lanternfly a nuisance pest in neighborhoods and for visitors to vineyards.

And so sooty mold here, you can see even the first instars, these little guys will excrete a lot of honeydew and sooty mold is what grows on that honeydew.

And so this is a common site in understory plants, anything that's beneath where lanternfly feeds that sooty mold blackens the leaves and basically blocks photosynthesis, and essentially kills understory plants.

And while we don't know what the long-term implications are for these natural areas, we're really not seeing this extent of sooty mold around vineyards.

But in addition to some natural areas, sooty mold can grow on anything.

And so it is also a contributing ick factor that makes this insect a nuisance.

And here you can see sooty mold that grew on decking, lanternflies excrement on decking, and this first step is one that was power washed.

So you can see how much sooty mold really accumulated there.

Okay, what other economic impacts?

Basically, we have reports from nurseries because basically they have to keep lanternfly out of all of their nursery products and keep egg masses.

We do have some reports of damage to nursery stock, but basically, this is kind of the problem everybody experiences, even though here, lanternflies don't feed on conifers, but that doesn't mean they don't get into them.

And so we see in late season that lanternflies fly as adults into new habitats.

And this is where management is really, really a challenge.

And so when they move as adults, they lay eggs.

And so you can see here on Christmas trees, three egg masses, it's really hard to see them.

So it's hard to know if lanternfly have laid egg masses on your product, be it Christmas trees or something else.

And so again, that's another impact that we see.

But relevant to vineyards, we see that other economic impacts of lanternfly are due to the need to keep it from spreading, keep it from moving.

And so Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture and most of the states in our area that have these quarantines in place, they require businesses to take some training online and get a permit.

And so for you who, you know, many of you are at vineyards.

And so the important thing for you is that you might see impacts on agritourism, the ick factor, the nuisance factor of lanternfly could influence visitation.

And an important thing we'd certainly like you to do if you're not doing it already, if you're in lanternfly land, please warn your visitors to be on the lookout for lanternfly hitchhiking with them.

We certainly don't want them to move as people visit vineyards and go from vineyard to vineyard as part of like a wonderful day in eastern US.

We don't want lanternfly to be transported.

And so a resource if you have this as something for Pennsylvania, other states have a similar thing.

There's downloadable checklists that kind of tell you what counties in a given state are under quarantine and suggest what people where on their car they should look and what they should look for based on time of year.

So you can have this link if that's helpful to you.

Okay, so let's talk about why lanternfly is really so problematic.

It only goes through one generation a year.

It overwinters as an egg mass.

And so right now we have hatch, we have, it'll go through a series of molts where you have these little first through third instars, our little black insects with white spots.

They feed really broadly on a range of herbaceous plants.

I have them in my yard on some Tree-of-Heaven that are coming up.

I have them on Virginia creeper, but they're really broadly distributed.

They move around and feed on a lot of different things, but they're feeding through herbaceous tissue.

Fourth instars, they start to feed on woody tissues.

And so common hosts there are black walnut, Tree-of-Heaven is a common host throughout the lifecycle as is grapes.

And then we see the first adults emerge in July, but then they don't, they're really weird.

And that even though adults emerge in July, they don't start mating and laying eggs until September.

And at this point we see them engage in these bouts of flight.

And so this is often when we see them move in high numbers to vineyards.

This is where it is a problem for vineyards.

And we think at this point because they have to put on weight and feed so, so heavily in order to become reproductively mature males and females, but especially females, oftentimes that's when they move to get fresher host plants to feed upon, to feed voraciously.

And so some great work that Heather Leach conducted on vineyards in Eastern Pennsylvania looked at when, you know, when lanternfly move into vineyards.

And what you can see that as earlier instars as nymphs, we don't see high numbers, but we see those high numbers really coming in.

And this is what's so challenging for a lanternfly, lemme go back here, is that even though insecticides will kill lanternfly, they keep coming in.

And so let me show you, even though this wasn't done on vineyards, I think this particular study encapsulates really clearly what makes lanternfly so problematic.

And I'll extend it to vineyards here in a second.

And so this was a study that was conducted by Dennis Calvin and John Rost, and what they did is they sampled lanternfly and trapped them out of 20 red maples in this development in Wyomissing, which is just outside of Redding.

And so each of these little dots is a short red maple tree.

And what they did is they put sticky bands up and lanternfly basically has a negative geotaxis, it walks up things, right?

And so you can take advantage of that and put sticky bands around the trees and trap them.

And so they put sticky bands on each of these trees over the course of the season, changed them weekly, and then when the adults emerge, the adults often don't stick on the sticky bands, they actually collected them out, which they could, they were shorter trees, they could get most of them and collected them into ethanol for me to dissect.

And so what they found is that here, looking at these 20 trees, what they did is first, they estimated what the size of the population was per tree.

So we average, they counted egg masses and we average, we estimate that an egg mass will have on average 37 insects.

So based on their counted egg masses, they started with on an average of 475 bugs per tree.

And then they put up these traps, they collected off each week, you know, as first instars, an average of just short of 251st instars, second instars, 167.

Basically you're seeing the numbers drop, which this makes sense if you put sticky bands on the same 20 trees, trade them out every week, you are going to see or you would expect to see this decline in the population.

What happens then as adults, boom, adults totally came back in.

So they're coming in from some other source population.

Okay, then what happens in terms of egg masses?

Check this out.

So we have an average of 615 bugs per tree in the suburban development.

And then boom, when we go to egg masses and multiply number of egg masses that they counted times 37 bugs per egg mass, we had to change the scale.

And so the population hugely increased.

And so basically, this movement and inability to really figure out where is the source population?

Where all of them coming from just this particular tree fragment or fragment of trees?

This is why lanternfly has a problem, it moves across these habitats.

And so when we see them moving into vineyards, this is the problem that growers have.

You see these aren't great berries, this isn't mulch, that's lanternfly.

And so we see these huge numbers come in, sprays are really effective, they'll kill high numbers.

You get thousands of lanternfly on the ground beneath these vines, but the problem is they keep coming in, you have a short pre-harvest interval, you can't spray insecticides that lasts very long.

And so lanternfly continues to come in, you spend a lot of money on sprays and it still is not enough to ward off feeding damage from these insects.

And so to date, now we're in present, where we are, this is a situation, how do we respond to it?

There's a lot of different chemical insecticides that are effective in killing lanternfly.

And so unfortunately, just where we are in current management is really highly dependent on preventative chemical control.

And so here we have a list, I have a link here to the vineyard management.

A lot of things will kill them.

What else can we do?

If you figure, okay, egg masses, there're egg masses for seven to eight months a year, that's the longest life stage.

What if we target the egg masses?

There are a variety of ovucides that are available.

They're typically insecticidal oils.

They aren't 100% effective, but they're good at treating.

You know, you can treat about, it'll kill about 75% best of treated eggs.

And they're good if you apply them between February and April.

Also, mechanical scraping can be done, but if you have lanternfly, you know that's really labor intensive.

And another issue is that perhaps the egg masses are out of reach.

And so we did a study, it was led by Kelly Hoover's postdoc Joe Keller.

And basically, what he did is he got in contact with parks that were felling Tree-of-Heaven trees, Ailanthus altissima trees to try to get rid of their lanternfly.

And so when they would fell these trees, they would cut them into three meter chunks and we counted how many egg masses were, you know, between zero and three meters from the ground and on up.

And unfortunately, what we found is that most egg masses we're well out of reach.

They're six meters above the ground.

So this kind of shows there's not gonna be a single silver bullet that takes care of lanternfly.

Egg mass control is not gonna bring us a full solution because many are out of reach.

Sticky bands in terms of trapping and monitoring.

Sticky bands are effective, they can catch non-targets beneficial insects, sometimes birds or other vertebrates.

But there's modifications that can be employed there.

These are modifications are available on the website.

Research that we've done that has looked at the efficacy of sticky bands versus circle traps.

The idea here is that everything takes advantage of lanternfly walking up vertical surfaces.

So rather than sticking them on tape, can we collect them into, you know, these catch baskets that have a little kill strip in it?

And so we found that yes, circle traps are comparable to sticky bands in terms of number of lanternfly they catch.

This is effective if we have areas with high populations, it's not really effective in low sites.

It's really not been modified well for use in vineyards.

Kind of this also let us test methyl salicylate lure that was developed.

And so basically, what we found when we tested this bait is that the lure doesn't really work.

So folks are still working on it, but unlike other insects that use pheromones for mating, lanternflies are thought to use substrate borne vibration for mating.

And so to date we don't have a good pheromone lure for them, which makes the trapping and monitoring really problematic.

As far as monitoring, what can you do?

Our recommendations are based on time of year, you know, so you take into account the life stage.

These are some common plant hosts that they tend to feed on, and where you can find them on those hosts.

But that brings up the subject of, okay, other cultural controls.

People have asked, should I remove Tree-of-Heaven?

And here you see, this huge stand of Tree-of-Heaven and we have information on the Penn State website about removal.

And so this is really, we don't have a good answer for this.

The efficacy of of Tree-of-Heaven removal hasn't been formally evaluated.

It kind of depends on the context.

So for example, the State of California, California Department of Food and Agriculture, one of the things they're doing, they don't have lanternfly there established.

So the idea that removing Tree-of-Heaven preventatively to reduce the likelihood that it could establish, yes, that it is likely to be effective.

If you're already in the middle of a lanternfly infestation and you spend thousands of dollars to remove your Tree-of-Heaven, which is challenging in and of itself because it suckers, the seed bank is there, that's a costly measure.

Is that going to do much depending on how it's moving across the landscape?

That's not a clearer solution, it's not a clearer answer.

And so if we go back to our vineyard here, the idea is if you remove the preferred hosts, essentially what you're trying to do is remove the source.

And so if we look at this vineyard, where is the source of lanternfly?

And so here you look in the distance, this looks like a lake, that's not a lake, it's actually an Amazon distribution center.

I'll show you this in a second.

So if we look at an aerial view, you can see this is that plot of grapes and you can see the damage to it.

And so this is last year.

When we were working here, we had a heavy infestation of lanternfly on some beautiful 100-year-old oak trees in this area.

If you look there isn't lanternfly really around.

So you say what is the source?

The source, yes, they were in those trees, they were out here.

If you zoom out a little bit, you might say, okay, and so here you can see the distribution center.

You know, is it the case that this area, these fragments are where these lanternflies are coming in?

Perhaps.

But even zooming out, you have fragmented landscapes and it's really, really hard to tell what that source population is.

So it's hard to know, it's unlikely that just removing Tree-of-Heaven in and around a given vineyard is enough to do it.

Again, this is why I am saying, I think we need to work at a broader geographic scale.

Again, why it's really important for you all to report what you're seeing in surveys so that we can get a much bigger picture, bird's eye view.

Future issues, future directions here, I have about, I'll be finish in a few minutes here.

Basically, we need to get creative and folks are.

And so testing new integrated pest management methods.

I'll tell you about a couple of those that are currently underway, and some ideas that folks have.

And then also directions going on with some biological control options and some work we're doing in my lab on feeding behavior.

And so here, there's a study of exclusion netting that's being conducted at this cooperating vineyard.

And this is a wall that's been put up and there's some panels are treated with insecticide impregnated netting, others just exclusion netting.

And so this is currently being tested.

There'll be three, last year was the third year of data collection.

I think it's gonna be a mixed signal.

I think lanternfly we're coming in from different directions those three years, but I think that'll be a really interesting set of results when we get those.

But more recently, a study that Heather Leach published with Michela and some others of us where exclusive, this was not insecticide treated netting, this was just plain old hail netting with 6 by 1.8 millimeter mesh that was installed in five vineyards.

The growers still sprayed as needed, but basically, this exclusion netting was compared to grapes that weren't covered.

And basically what you can see is that the netting reduced SLF on vines by 99.8%.

So it really, it did a lot.

They looked at grape quality.

It didn't have an effect on fruit quality nor on air temperature, humidity, or fungal disease.

Fruit flies, it we're still able, like in terms of the gauge in the mesh, fruit flies we're able to still pass through.

The earlier instars were, but it kept adults out.

And so this is something that further testing and further research to try to deal with this could be, you know, a useful approach particularly in areas where like perhaps in Canada where they don't have the use of all of the insecticide options that we have in Pennsylvania.

Also part of that study, what we did was compare just insecticide sprayed only around the perimeter compared to full cover of the whole plot insecticide applications.

And so what we found there was that the residual efficacy declined after eight meters in to the vineyard.

So the perimeter spray, obviously, it's a perimeter spray, it's limited, but in terms of number of lanternfly counted per vine, there was no difference in the control gained from the full cover sprays versus just the perimeter spray.

So by only spraying the perimeter that, you know, reduced the area being sprayed by 31%, it was faster and obviously, use less insecticide.

And so the idea here is that further work could build on this, perhaps to use something like Beauveria bassiana, which is really expensive, but something that could be applied just to perimeters, particularly areas abutting potentially treat areas.

So a way to employ bio softer chemicals or more expensive bio pesticides in limited areas, and see if that has a better impact.

One of the things that we're really also trying to understand, and again why I think your survey, I'll just keep talking about the survey, why I think it's so cool is that we see a tremendous amount of yearly variation.

There's like kind of a common expectation that when any area, but especially a vineyard gets hit with lanternfly, that you're essentially getting a wall of the infestation that hits an area where it's really, really bad for a few years and then it kind of moves out, and you're through it.

In this particular vineyard, there was heavy infestation damage in 2018 through 2020.

2021 was when that wall was erected and the populations were extremely low.

And so that was kind of weird, except typically when lanternfly come in, they came in a little bit, but rather than coming in at the end of September, they came in a whole month later in October in this particular vineyard.

And then unusual, this is a neighboring vineyard, but what we saw in, this is a neighboring vineyard very close to the one with the exclusion netting and in the vineyard with the exclusion netting last year, they were absolutely inundated with lanternfly in 2022.

So it looked like they had gotten the wave, it subsided in '21 and then it kind of came back with a vengeance, many egg masses laid throughout that vineyard and a neighboring one.

And so what we think is going on is that the lanternfly are kind of depleting host plants in a certain area and then they move out, but they could come back in.

But again, this is why we need reports from a bigger geographic scale.

Other things going on is USDA, ARS and APHIS, they're working on two parasitoid wasps that they collected from lanternfly's native range, specifically in China.

They have them in quarantine, they're testing them.

One is an egg parasitoid, Anastatus Orientalis, it lays its eggs and the eggs have spotted lanternfly.

Right now, they have this in colony and what they're doing is they're testing to make sure that it doesn't lay its eggs in other non-target insects.

And in lab studies they've found that yes, it will, if you don't give it a choice and you give it something that isn't a lanternfly egg mass.

Yes, in some cases it'll lay its eggs there, but those are not really ecologically realistic conditions.

And so there's further testing on the non-target host plants with this.

And so this is still promising, but we're really not sure.

They have another super cool parasitoid.

It lays its eggs in the nymphs and eats them from the inside out, and it forms this little fecal sac, and they have that in colony that's really promising.

These kinds of parasitoids are seen on other planthopper nymphs.

And so I think this is a really promising result.

There's also a biological control agent that's being tested, and this is pretty far underway.

That's a Verticillium wilt, that's a biological control of Tree-of-Heaven.

And so this is basically, this is a picture looking up at the tree canopy for trees that were treated in the mid-Atlantic in Virginia with this Verticillium versus a different kind of control Verticillium.

And basically so far, there's further testing that's required, but so far, this could be a promising way to remove Tree-of-Heaven that also stays in the spores stay in an area for a while.

So it can be longer acting, but again, potentially promising work being done there.

And then there's a lot of different irons in the fire.

Some of the work we're doing in my lab, we're studying lanternfly feeding behavior.

So if you take that chitinous exoskeleton off the mouth parts, if you break it off, you'll see that the mouth parts are really too thin, hair-like stylets, you can't see too because they're stuck together.

And basically, what lanternflies do is they'll insert those thin stylets into the plants and there's a technology, electrical penetration graph has been developed, you know, for a while here based on aphids.

And what they do is, I'll show you with lanternfly, we have a little setup here with lanternfly and you glue a gold wire with silver to be conductant, with silver glue to a lanternfly and you stick an electrical probe in the plant and you run an electrical circuit very slight, so you don't change, you don't, you know, nuke the insect or change its behavior, but basically, when it inserts its mouth parts into the plant tissue, you're able to complete that electrical circuit and what you get are different patterns, like on an oscilloscope.

We record these different patterns and these different patterns relate to different feeding behaviors.

And so here, this is a lanternfly hooked up in the lab to a cucumber plant, but basically, we've gotten waveforms for all the life stages.

What we do is kind of decode what those feeding behaviors are.

Tall spikes might correspond to the placement of the stylets in the phloem tissue versus xylem versus salivation.

And so once we decode the host plant tissues, we can record patterns of feeding.

And this has been done with glassy-winged sharpshooter, a pest of grapes in California.

And basically we wanna replicate what was done with glassy-winged sharpshooter, we wanna test different varieties of grape to determine are some more resistant to lanternfly feeding than others.

And so try to identify traits and varieties of grapes that might be more resistant if we understand how the insect is feeding within the plant.

And so just wanna mention, we also have a large grant, I'm working on with 37 other folks, updates are on StopSLF.org.

There's a lot of other irons in the fire, can also including fungal reagents and whatnot.

And with that I will stop there and take any questions you might wanna throw at me.

- Excellent, thank you Julie.

- [Julie] Sure.

- Thank you for that information.

I do wanna say that I just posted a survey, a survey link for today's webinar, the webinar you're on, and the presentation you just saw, we'd be grateful if you could provide feedback about today's webinar and the information you learned.

So I just posted that link in the chat.

And also, if I set up the Zoom correctly, you should get the same survey as soon as you close out your Zoom, this Zoom meeting and you should get the survey in your browser.

So thanks in advance for giving us feedback about the webinar today.

So Julie, I did my best to look for questions and I will ask them in the order that they were typed.

- [Julie] Awesome.

- So the first question that I saw was, do these things, do SLF impact Asian pears?

- No, they don't seem to like them at all.

And so there was basically, Brian Walsh is one of our extension educators and he's collected all sorts of data in different areas, but basically in, outside of some strip malls in Eastern Pennsylvania, like outside of Wegmans in a larger complex, there's different ornamental trees that have been planted and we've gone for like three years and counted adults on those trees and counted eggs.

And I think either that or in the surrounding areas, there's a species of Asian pear, I don't know the details of it, but we commented on them really never, never being found on Asian pears.

I can follow up with more detail with that, but no reports and I think that that's something that it really, especially when other things are available doesn't, it'll much prefer red or silver maple.

- Okay, great, thanks Julie.

There was a question about, if there's interest in images caught of nymphs on trees, not grapevines, is there interest from the group here, like the spot, the folks that work on spotted lanternfly for images that are caught of SLF on trees?

- I mean, potentially, I think that there's partly I think especially, if they're first instar would be my answer because this whole idea of trying to identify where the source population is and how can we target different life stages, I had a bullet point talking about bio pesticides potentially being used at targeted stages.

I saw a colleague on here, Stefan, basically someone at Virginia Tech actually working on this and so I don't wanna mispronounce your name, Stefan Jaronski.

And so basically, the idea is that we have some data that show lanternflies that lay their eggs on red maple, the first instars will stick around on red maple.

And so something like Beauveria bassiana, you know, could be targeted to that particular instar stage when they're not really moving, we know they're hanging out in that tree and not moving all around throughout the habitat.

I think particularly early instars, knowing what tree they're on could be useful to let us target that stage.

But that being said, I don't know of any systematic like, efforts to organize those kinda data.

- Okay, great.

Thanks, Julie.

Next one is in this, I think we can take the context of this question and figure it out, but last year was the first year that I had adults, there were hundreds over silver maples, walnuts, and vines tried to spray them, but they jumped, used gloves, smashed on tree.

How do you kill them?

So I guess that's the question is how do you kill them?

- I mean, it really, basically, you're never going to keep lanternfly off your property if they're around, right?

They're incredibly patchly distributed.

And so I would say if you have, basically, if you have egg masses that you can get to and you know, if you have that many adults, chemical sprays will work.

Tree injections, but I would only treat trees with a systemic insecticide like a neonicotinoid like imidacloprid or dinotefuran if you have a lot feeding on that one tree.

You don't want to treat trees with these chemicals if they're not already there.

That's a good way to kill a lot of insects.

Again, our colleague who did that with a tree in his yard counted, he killed over 14,000 dead lanternfly in seven days on one tree.

So there are chemical options if you wanna do that.

If they're laying their eggs there, you could physically remove the eggs, you could put modified sticky bands.

You know, look at the Penn State extension website for safe ways to put up sticky bands that will protect the bands from catching birds and things.

But that would be another way because if they're on those trees, they're gonna walk up and get caught.

- Yeah, and I'll just remind, you know, that some of these chemicals, you know, I mean, always follow the label and I think some of these chemicals might be for commercial only, I'm not sure.

So I don't know, like the folks that are asking these questions, I'm not sure if they're commercial and they have their license or they're homeowners, and so there there might be some differences in what chemicals can be legally used.

- Thank you for- - Sure, sure, thank you.

So the next question, and I can try to help if you need it, but the question was to what extent does a vineyard's preexisting health in nutrition mitigate SLF damage?

- I'd say you take it because it's going to, right? (chuckles)

- Yeah, and that's, yeah, we could speculate all day about how, how much this helps, right?

It won't, what I would say is that, it won't mitigate feeding, right?

Because feeding that'll happen regardless of health status if they're there, right?

But to mitigate the question was appropriately worded.

I think mitigating SLF damage, we've always said that you can, the best tool for managing spotted lanternfly above and beyond timely insecticide applications, and other cultural things that are in our spotted lanternfly vineyard management guide is to practice textbook viticulture.

Have healthy vines, optimal health nutrition status, optimal fungal disease management, just opti...

Again, textbook vineyard management.

So, and I would say that this is, spotted lanternfly is an added stressor, so add on this to fungal disease pressure and over cropping, and poor fungal disease management.

And it's just another thing that could diminish the perennial health and sustainability of a vineyard, okay?

And I think that's, and Julie you can add on anything else about that, I think that's as best as we can speculate.

- I think that's great, yep.

- Okay, if Tree-of-Heaven is removed and spotted lanternfly likes grapes as much as Tree-of-Heaven, will they not just go to the grapes without Tree-of-Heaven?

- And I saw that was Wendy.

Hi Wendy.

Yeah, I mean, that's an empirical question, right?

That's exactly, that could be the problem.

And so especially if you're going to, that's why we said it's the efficacy of the Tree-of-Heaven removal hasn't been tested.

It might be more reasonable to test it if the Verticillium is an option, but basically yes, you might just move them onto grapes.

The idea there, and this is where Pennsylvania Department of Ag and USDA originally came up with this trap tree approach that you don't want to do that by removing all of your Tree-of-Heaven.

So they, you know, in the early years especially, they removed like 90% of Tree-of-Heaven, kept the remaining trees as trap trees, treated them with a systemic neonic, dinotefuran, and then that let all the, you know, lanternfly come to those trees so they didn't go outta the grapes and it was an effective way to kill a lot of them.

So the idea there is that if you did want to try to remove Tree-of-Heaven around vineyards to try to prevent lanternfly, I would leave some as trap trees for that, for monitoring and then, you know, if you have them for treatment.

But again, this is, it's still speculative.

- Yeah, okay.

Thanks, Julie.

Okay, another question was, has anyone tried using portable vacuums to suck them off trees?

- Yes.

New York state has done that, I think it's their Department of Transportation, but basically yes, that's how they've collected them.

There's, you know, we collect them into bottles, but yeah, like that's an effective way to get a big number of them.

- Okay.

Next.

There was a talk that spotted lanternfly needed Tree-of-Heaven to develop.

Can they develop solely on other hosts?

- Yes.

And so here, like there's a couple of issues.

One is that in their native range there are areas where there isn't Tree-of-Heaven and you have populations.

There's been a lot, a number of studies that have tried to rear lanternfly in captivity and also in semi-captive settings like planning and enclosure of trees with multiple species, you know, in a field.

And so what those found was that, you can get lanternfly to survive and get to adult status without Tree-of-Heaven.

They tend to develop a little bit faster if they have access to Tree-of-Heaven, but those studies are really important to understand what are suitable host plants for them.

But even in the best captive-reared studies, the captive-reared lanternfly don't look anything like the adult lanternfly in terms of fitness, in terms of their fecundity.

My lab has taken to only studying wild populations and comparing them to lab-reared.

And so basically, if we got rid of all of the Tree-of-Heaven, if that were even possible, no, lanternfly would still develop fine.

It's more that they require a broad diet than that they necessarily require Tree-of-Heaven.

I think a lot of the talk about, do they or do they not need Tree-of-Heaven kind of came from the fact that that's what the government agency's treated, it makes sense if you're a government agency and you want to use a neonicotinoid that's a systemic that anything coming in and feeding on it and feeding on the sap is gonna get killed.

That's a way to be more selective than by doing a pyrethroid knockdown that kills everything arachnophobia, right?

You know, so you limit it to only the things that are feeding on it, but if you did that to red maple, like how many things use red maple?

Like you would be killing all sorts of stuff.

But Tree-of-Heaven is an introduced invasive, it isn't used by a lot of native insects.

So that seemed to be a good bet for, Hey, let's dose that because now we're being more selective for lanternfly.

That's why they only focused at least originally on Tree-of-Heaven, but that kind of got turned into, well, it's because lanternfly needs Tree-of-Heaven, no.

Tree-of-Heaven is certainly effective in letting populations established.

I think it's an important part of its biology.

That's how it moves and it gets, it has a food source anywhere, it hops off the train, but it's not a hundred percent needed.

Other scientists disagree with me, but I think I'm speaking with a preponderance of data is what I'm saying.

- Excellent, thank you Julie.

So we're a little after one at this point, and I don't know, Julie, do you have time to stick around for... - Sure.

- 5 or 10 more...

Why don't we say 5 or 10 more minutes because you know, I get the sense sometimes this can go on and on and I will say that when we do end, if your question has not been answered, we apologize.

I would encourage you to email Julie or any of us and to get your question answered, but why don't we say we'll go to 1:10 Eastern Time, is that all right?

- Cool.

- Okay, thank you.

There was a question about are there concerns about introducing a foreign species to control another foreign species?

- Yes, definitely.

And that's why basically, the folks who are doing this, Kim Hummer's recently retired, but he's at the USDA ARS facility.

It's a quarantine facility in Newark, Delaware.

And Juli Gould leads another partner agency in Massachusetts.

And they're kind of like the rock stars of biological control in the US, they've been doing this for decades.

And these are highly secured facilities, and it's basically almost a decade of research that's gone into it.

And so they're not going to release anything unless, like there's really stringent requirements for any release to happen.

And again, that non-target testing is a really big part of what they're doing and kind of where they are in the process now.

So yes, there's a concern, but at least in terms of the parasitoid wasps, those are people who know what they're doing and there's standards and rules in place.

- Okay, great.

Thank you, Julie.

Now I'm going to try to, those were all the questions that I had taken before I started asking you questions.

So Michela, I see you came on.

Do you have some questions that you can ask Julie?

- Yeah, I tracked the questions after she, you know, finish with the presentation and- - Okay. - Okay, I'll go I guess in order, so someone ask how many egg masses that is one female lay in a year?

- Oh, this is...

That's such a good question.

From work that Tracy Leskey at USDA in West Virginia has been able to get them to lay eggs in captivity, you know, like rear them all the way, like that's she's trading out trees and their work has found an average of just over two egg masses per female.

You have to change the light conditions and that kind of stuff, but this is a question I'm super interested in because the question is, okay, now that they're in North Carolina and you essentially have a longer growing season, right?

The plants don't go dormant.

Can they keep feeding and can they keep laying more eggs?

So are we going to see three plus egg masses?

And so that's something that I'm working on, I think it could be the case.

The thing that's kind of interesting about lanternflies is that folks are reporting when they see the first eggs laid in any given area, and it tends to be like third week of September, typically there's variation, but it's the same time in North Carolina, you know, and in different places, you know, as we move north.

And so we think that lanternfly egg laying might be triggered by a change in day length because that's when the days start to get shorter.

And so even though growing degree days and their amount of feeding, and their exposure to temperature influences development, it seems like that's not the complete story.

So if it is the case that eggs don't get, don't start ailing, doesn't start till then at least you're limiting the window in one direction, (chuckles) you know?

But yeah, no, I think that's a super important question that we're trying to answer.

- I'll go ahead with another one.

I know there are many, sorry, but, so will spotted lanternfly killed regeneration in a forest when present a high population level, is that can be an issue?

- Well, I think again, it's all relative, right?

Because what it feeds on depends on what's in the area, but at least to date, what we don't really see it, it can penetrate into forests, but we never really see it in high numbers in the interior forests.

It's more accumulating on the edge.

It's more of an edge species.

It feeds even as adults in disturbed areas.

And so in terms of impacts into forested areas, we're not really seeing that in areas where we see black walnut production, like in Northeastern Pennsylvania.

Now that it's spreading there, I think we'll need to watch to see if it can penetrate into those stands.

But in terms of any timber production in that, we're not seeing any big populations in those areas.

- Thanks, Julie.

There was actually trying to follow, like compare the timestamp of the questions in the chat and the Q&A.

There was one about, there was a question about is Tree-of-Heaven the same as a sumac tree?

- Yeah, no, they're not.

They look very similar.

I think maybe on the Penn State Extension Tree-of-Heaven fact sheet, it might have the comparison, but do you guys wanna answer for the difference?

I know that Tree-of-Heaven smells like peanut butter.

It doesn't have the serrations at the edges of the leaves that cement those.

- I think your answer is fine.

They're not the same and I'm sure online there's some resources that you can compare.

- But that said, we have a place where we have been collecting lanternfly in Sinking Springs, where it's kind of, we look for sites where we can collect high numbers to use in our insecticide trials.

So if any of you know of a site, please let me know 'cause our population died out.

But for the last four years, we had really good populations.

It was a strand of like Tree-of-Heaven next to an agricultural field, but right at the edge of it was sumac and the sumac was always covered with lanternfly as well.

And so while they don't prefer it, they'll certainly feed on it.

- Okay, so I said we'd go till 1:10 PM, so this may be the last question.

Let's see if I'm getting the timestamp right.

Okay, so in Colorado we don't have lanternflies and we don't want them.

Have you noticed any particularly effective outreach or education for the public about preventing accidental transfer or anything that hasn't worked regarding this?

- Well, I think this is the whole Stomp It campaign.

And so, I think the idea that there's so many articles written like in the major news presses, especially when lanternfly got to New York City, right?

And so I think the public awareness has been great.

And so it's a very...

People love, if you do a social media search for lanternfly, people are posting, people are kind of obsessed with this insect, right?

And obsessed with killing it.

So I think there's a very strong awareness and the idea of the Stomp It campaign, people think that that's what our main control tactics are and know, Stomp It is more, you know, if you don't kill it, you're gonna carry it.

And so I think the public media that is out there now is really effective.

And, you know, thinking like, I remember hearing the report in Iowa.

I got a call from a reporter, was it last year?

Before I heard it internally through the scientists.

And so I think people are responding more quickly because it is so in the news.

So I think it has been, and if you look at how quickly it's spread across South Korea versus the rate of spread here, it's spreading at a much slower rate.

And so I think the public awareness, especially for that Stomp It campaign as multiple states have done it in a, you know, we're all kind of working with USDA on that.

I think it's been an effective campaign.

And the other thing with that is we have, since we have a grant for that kind of outreach, we're able to share, you know, if you cite the copyright or whatever, we're able to share our materials with you and you can adapt them to put your state logo and name, and stuff on it and take advantage of all of the advertising and media things that people have already put together.

- Julie, we can't thank you enough for doing this today.

- Oh, sure.

I hope this is helpful.

- I think it was, amongst all the questions, interspersed was praise for your presentation and the information, and I'd echo that.

Really appreciate it.

And there were so many questions that we will be left unanswered, but I would encourage those that have questions, if you wanna follow up with us, please do.

You can contact us and ask us those questions.

So in the interest of time, we will end today.

And I just want to thank, thank Claudia, thank Michela, and thank you all for joining us today.

And thanks once again to Julie, thank you.

- Thank you all so much.

- [Cane] Have good day.