Economic Collapse

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America Isn’t Ready for the Lanternfly Invasion

A bizarre pest from Asia is spreading fast and putting billions of dollars’ worth of resources at risk.


An adult lanternfly’s wings are drab white with black spots and a bright red underside. Photographer: Will Warasila for Bloomberg Businessweek

By Andrew Zaleski
October 2, 2018, 5:00 AM EDT

From the road heading east, the apple trees of Beekman Orchards unfold in waves, rising and falling on a sea of verdant grass. Behind them, basking in the June sunlight, are row upon row of pinot noir, riesling, and traminette grapes. It’s for the vineyard that I’ve driven to this 170-acre estate in Berks County, an hour and a half northwest of Philadelphia. Beekman Orchards is a fourth-generation family enterprise, now carefully stewarded by Calvin Beekman, a large 59-year-old man with a calm voice and meat-hook hands.

“I told one fella one time I don’t need to go to Atlantic City, because we’re the biggest gamblers there are,” he tells me outside his farmhouse. In 1999, Beekman planted the vineyard, 40 acres of red and white grapes that once brought in about a quarter-million dollars annually. On this day, several rows of vines in the middle of the patch are a lush green, close to the fruit-set stage. Mid-June is usually when clusters of grapes bloom, growing until harvest begins in mid-September. In the rows farther out, though, no clusters are visible, and the grape-shoot trunks are blackened, dead. Beekman gestures toward a set of riesling vines that went in just last year. “This row contains 140 plants,” he says. “I don’t think you can find 1 percent that’s viable.”

A third of his vineyard has suffered a similar fate. Another third is struggling. And the luxuriant middle third? It could be at risk, too. He points to the woodlands surrounding his farm and utters a word that’s been unnerving farmers, foresters, public officials, and entomologists alike: “lanternflies.”

The spotted lanternfly, Lycorma delicatula, is a mothlike insect about an inch long and a half-inch wide. Native to Southeast Asia, it was discovered in Berks County in 2014. Already it’s threatening to harm more plants and crops than even the brown marmorated stink bug, discovered in Pennsylvania around the turn of the century and now wreaking havoc in 43 states.

Beekman points to a patch of terrain where, last August, he counted 325 lanternflies in the span of a yard. Unlike the stink bug and the emerald ash borer, another invasive insect that arrived from Asia to the mid-Atlantic region, the lanternfly moves in hordes. Spot one lanternfly, and lurking nearby you’ll likely find hundreds, if not thousands. They can overwhelm a tree, coating it from root to leaf, feasting on sap before disgorging a glutinous substance that disrupts photosynthesis and kills plants. “You come outside, and it’s just swarms and swarms and swarms,” Beekman says, describing the scene from last summer. “You probably would’ve had 20 of them crawl up you by now.”

In 2017, Pennsylvania’s lanternfly population soared, spreading across 4.5 million acres and prompting a quarantine that required businesses and residents to check outdoor items for bugs before moving them out of any of 13 affected counties. “We thought the stink bug was bad, because it feeds on a wide range of plants, can cause damage to different crops, and has a nuisance factor,” says Emelie Swackhamer, a horticulturalist with Penn State University. “But the lantern­fly, it’s just much worse. It has this really broad feeding behavior, and that’s unusual for an insect. And it threatens so many of our high-value commodities.”
An adult lanternfly’s wings are drab white with black spots and a bright red underside.
Photographer: Will Warasila for Bloomberg Businessweek

Quantifying or predicting the economic damage caused by invasive pests is difficult, but Beekman’s tally of his farm’s damages and expenses provides some insight into the danger: His 2017 losses, he estimates, were $100,000, with projected 2018 losses of $250,000. In June, the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture suggested the spotted lanternfly might cause $18 billion in damage statewide. Posting on Facebook in mid-September, Penn State said the fly “could be the most destructive species in 150 years.”

The state hasn’t come up with industry-specific estimates, but the hardwood and fruit-growing industries are especially threatened. “This is our No.?1 concern,” says Sarah Hall-Bagdonas of the Northern Tier Hardwood Association, which is hosting dozens of information sessions for lumber companies from Virginia to New York. In New York, forestry is a $13.1 billion industry that supports 42,000 jobs. In Virginia, it’s a $21 billion business with 108,000 workers. In Pennsylvania: $19 billion and 66,000 employees. Hardwood companies working in any of the 13 quarantined counties now require a special permit from the state agriculture department proving that they can identify the lanternfly and have a plan to contain the bug, which is thought to hitch rides across state borders on the undercarriages of cars, trains, and 18-wheelers.

This February, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue announced that his department was committing $17.5 million to stem the lanternfly’s spread. In a sense, it was already too late. The lanternfly had been spotted in New York a few months earlier and in Virginia weeks before. Three New Jersey counties are under quarantine after confirmed sightings in July. Delaware and Maryland are both on alert.

State and federal entomologists have recommended a few containment strategies, but they don’t yet have a foolproof way to kill, or even count, the bug. If they can’t find a solution, lanternflies could infest forests all along the Atlantic seaboard, giving communities from New England to Florida an intimate look at what Penn State entomologist Tom Baker calls “the weirdest, most pernicious insect I’ve ever seen.”


A Pennsylvania State University researcher conducts an insecticide experiment. Photographer: Will Warasila for Bloomberg Businessweek

Continues at:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-02/america-isn-t-ready-for-the-lanternfly-invasion