PHOTO: SHUTTERSTOCK

The invasion is beginning. 

But just how big of an invasion of Spotted Lanternflies Pittsburgh will experience remains to be seen. Pictures and videos are starting to pop up on local social media, including Reddit/Pittsburgh, which shows a building column outside of UPMC Mercy covered with them. 

We all remember what happened last fall. 

“The whole front of the building was freaking covered with them,” recalls Sandy Feather, who works out of the Energy Innovation Center in the Hill District, which has a glass facade. And it would take her 10 minutes to knock off all the insects on her Toyota before she could even leave the parking lot. 

She’s the horticulture/green industry extension educator with Penn State Extension, which educates the public about the insects’ behavior.

Right now we’re just a little early to see the size of the onslaught of the emerging adults, she says. “Let’s give them another week to see how they’re cooking.”

If anything, the populations are moving westward and southward, she says. She’s getting calls from research scientists in Eastern Pennsylvania — areas where lanternflies were an “absolute plague” a few years ago — asking for samples of adult lanternflies for study because they’ve disappeared in that part of the state. They were first seen in Berks County in 2014.

“There is still so much we don’t know about these insects,” Feather says. “We don’t understand their populations.”

A few things they do know: There are three varieties of trees and plants that lanternflies have been documented to have killed when feeding off their sap: black walnut saplings, tree of heaven (a deciduous tree native to China but invasive here) and grape vines. 

Lanternflies also like to feed on red and silver maples and sumac trees or some thin-bark ornamental shrubs such as Japanese snowballs.

Scientists’ major goal is to prevent them from spreading to other regions, especially to Erie, where there are 50 miles of wineries and vineyards along the southern shore of Lake Erie. It’s imperative that people don’t allow them to hitchhike on their vehicles. 

If you see them on the ground, stomp on them. Feather said adult females will start laying eggs in mid-September. Each female will lay two masses of 30 to 50 eggs, so up to as many as 100 eggs. They’ll lay these on trees and other smooth surfaces like campers, vehicles, cushions of outdoor furniture and rocks, so scrape them off when you see them.

She suggests installing circle traps on trees you want to protect to capture lanternflies (basically it’s a tunnel that they walk into and end up in a collection container where they die). These will not capture birds, butterflies or praying mantises. You can order these on Amazon or find them at some gardening centers. Avoid encircling your trees with sticky tape, which can capture birds and beneficial insects.

The extension service also discourages the use of home remedy sprays to kill lanternflies because homeowners may cause more damage to their plants. Use only EPA-registered insecticides.

Feather, who carries a flyswatter in her car, said she’s known of some folks who have cut down “perfectly healthy trees” because of the Spotted Lanternfly. But she says down the road, they’ll miss those trees.

It’s unclear what the future will bring. There could be a light year and then the infestation could explode again.

But given the pattern she’s seen in Eastern Pennsylvania where they’ve virtually disappeared, she says we just need to be patient.

 “This, too, shall pass.”