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scorched-earth gardening. Swackhamer, who works out of
a Penn State oice in quarantined Montgomery County, is
spearheading Pennsylvania’s public education program.
Humans are also excellent carriers, so she encourages peo-
ple to inspect each other, their bags, and their cars if they’re
traveling through afected counties. Should you spot an egg
mass—a challenge, since they resemble splotches of mud—the
prescribed remedy is to scrape it into a plastic bag illed with
hand sanitizer, using a credit card or something similarly thin.
Don’t scrape too hard, though, or the eggs are liable to scatter.
Weller has resorted to chopping down and burning vir-
tually all the ailanthuses on Rolling Rock Building Stone’s
600-acre property. He says he’s seeing results: “Other years
you could hardly count the lanternlies, there were so many.
This year there are very few.”
As for Beekman’s grapes, he’s been spraying them with
a systemic called imidacloprid, which is known to be efec-
tive on other sucking insects, such as moths and beetles.
Compared with last year, he says, he’s seen fewer lanternly
nymphs on the borders of his vineyard.
That sounds like a promising sign, until we walk up to the
woods at the southern edge. At the base of a tree, he crouches
down and gingerly lifts up a piece of foliage: Walking along the
stem are two lanternly nymphs, not more than a few weeks
old. Above us, on the underside of an ailanthus branch hang-
ing high above our heads, Beekman points out six egg masses.
Soon they’ll hatch and mature into a swarm.
“There could be 400 lanternly eggs in that little section,”
he says. “They’ll igure out how to survive.”
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October 8, 2018
For farmers, multiple sprays would be required over a single
growing season, delicately timed to be sure food is both pest-
and pesticide-free. Don’t spray often enough, and crops will be
destroyed or infested; spray too often or too close to harvest
time, and they’ll be covered with chemicals. Applying chemical
insecticides to fruit could also kill other species, such as wild
bees, which tree-fruit growers rely on for pollination.
A large chunk of the $17.5 million the USDA has committed to
combating the lanternly will be spent in Pennsylvania, in addi-
tion to $3 million set aside in the state’s most recent budget.
Some of this money will be dedicated to creating more efec-
tive counting methods, some to assessing economic damage.
The USDA and the state are also paying to apply insecticides on
ailanthus trees near rail lines and on “trap trees”—designated
killing grounds—in the quarantine zone. “The idea is we have
to expand the area where we have this kind of treatment and
then sustain it for a couple years,” says Ruth Welliver, director
of Pennsylvania’s Bureau of Plant Industry.
Researchers would love to introduce a predatory species
that could end the infestation—in China, a parasitic wasp kills
the majority of lanternly eggs. But biological control is a
fraught business, a lesson entomologists learned when they
tried to contain gypsy moths that invaded New England and
the mid-Atlantic in the early 1900s. “They brought in a ly
that prefers to attack about 300 native butterlies and moths
over gypsy moths,” Biddinger says. “So now there’s a very
long quarantine process to bring in a biocontrol agent from
another country.”
For the moment, that leaves hypervigilance and
Insecticide experiment