How I learned to stop worrying and love the Spotted Lantern Fly

On our first ride of spring, my daughter pedaled around the neighborhood gathering treasures. Leaves, sticks, flowers, the occasional feather, we strolled slowly past the free bins blooming in front of the recently thawed sidewalks to assess. A glass bottle caught her eye, thick and shining in the afternoon sun, with a sky blue label and a protruding lip: it was a handle of Patron holding what I hoped was stagnant spring rain. “This will be perfect for my potions” she said, not even thinking she needed to convince me to let her take it home. She was right, it was special, andI told her she’d have to be careful with the glass, but that I’d be happy to carry it home for her. 

Once secured in our backyard it became a receptacle for newly emerging flower buds, hand pulled grass clippings, and anything shiny she could find. It held magic, and I would surreptitiously dump the contents every few days when the sparkly mix transitioned to sludge. If she noticed she didn’t mind, and only ever asked me to occasionally turn on the hose and refill it with water; the treasures she stored there were abundant, and she never needed help amassing them. 

It sat on our picnic table for a few weeks periodically emptied and refilled. As the days grew longer and the bliss of early spring gave way to the sober planning for summer, they arrived. Little black and white hoppers emerging from their eggs. I first noticed them crawling up a tree bursting from our neighbor’s driveway. In truth, I had been inspecting that tree for weeks, anticipating their appearance with dread. Each day I didn’t see them was a relief, but I knew the impending horde would emerge eventually.

If you ask my daughter she will recite our mantra: “Spotted Lantern Flies are not bad, they are just in the wrong place.” Last summer, when they ascended to the holy trinity of bugs we were allowed to kill (ticks, mosquitos, and now, the Lantern Flies) I was intimately familiar with the bloodlust that comes over a child that is encouraged to destroy. As a teacher, I’ve seen the glint in the eye of a toddler that builds a tower taller than him just to crash it down. I've witnessed the focus emerge from the most distractible 8 year olds when you give them a stick and ask them to destroy a patch of knotweed. I’ve even led a “lantern fly elimination squad” during recess and saw first hand how they took to the smushing with reckless abandon, opening the floodgates of their barely contained desire to destroy a living thing. I wanted to prevent that so I paused with her to appreciate their beauty, their flamboyant colors, their fearless flight path, their obvious vigor, but didn’t relent when it was inevitably time to flick, spray, or squish the invaders. 

 “They’re too beautiful” She’d say, when I stomped one. “And they make a disgusting mess when you squish them.” Examining their splattered organs on that paving stone, she paused and considered the mess. “Why can’t we just keep them alive so they aren’t disgusting? They aren’t doing anything wrong.”

“They’re eating our grapes,” I argued, gesturing towards the seedless Concord leaves, curling along the garden trellis. This plant was older than her, had survived moving twice, repotting six times, and now that we owned our first house it was finally in the ground and producing enough for a sizable harvest. 

“Why can’t we just share?” 

A piercing blow, carrying with it the echoes of previous lectures on why the bunnies can have some lettuce and birds can have some tomatoes and bugs can have some leaves, and that ultimately, they are entitled to it more than us. 

You see, Lantern Flies don’t actually eat the fruit itself, but pierce the tender stems to drink the sap, leaving behind a thick, sticky dew. That honeydew coats the foliage beneath them and breeds a black, smothering mold that starves the leaves of sunlight.  Despite their flamboyant coloration they are easy to spot by locating a patch of shimmering vegetation and looking directly up you will often find a troop of them clinging to the underside of stems and leaves. Later that night, unprompted, she told me that she likes how they make the leaves shiny. But where she saw sparkles, I saw pestilence, rot, and loss of yields. I regret that her ability to appreciate the iridescent leaves was not contagious, and I continued my battle at twilight after she had fallen asleep.

Like the black rot itself, my campaign expanded from regular yard maintenance to an all consuming vigilance. I found myself walking slower through the neighborhood, my eyes magnetically drawn to every trunk of their preferred host—the invasive Tree of Heaven—sprouting through driveway cracks or leaning over sagging alley fences of countless empty lots. I’d slow down when driving to inspect the terminal ends of saplings, grumbling about neighbors who didn’t share my growing obsession and the Department of Environmental Management that no longer even accepted sighting reports because the bugs were so pervasive. 

The fixation crept into my subconscious. Scanning leaves during every waking hour trained my brain to see them even when they weren't there. In the twilight, every curled leaf or woody knot resembled their alien form. When I closed my eyes at night, after-images burned bright against the dark of my eyelids. I hallucinated their tiny, erratic twitching, their sudden explosive leaps, their six segmented legs scrambling across an internal landscape. Their piercing, scarlet eyes haunted me in the dark. Were they mocking my importance? Pleading for some unearned mercy? Or were those vivid red beacons a testament to my complete loss of control?

I ordered 20% white vinegar, neem oil, and dish soap on Amazon, hoping naively to contain their numbers with chemical warfare. I doused the grapevines, the trellis, the lower branches of the neighbor's tree. But my frantic, daily drenching did what the insects hadn't yet managed: the acidic solution scorched the delicate leaves, and the heavy oil suffocated the vine's green shoots, slowly turning them brittle and black. I justified all of this in countless ways, reassured that I was using “natural” insecticides, that the dying leaves were caused by the invaders and not their humble steward, that I was making a dent in their population despite no observable dip in their numbers. With hindsight I wonder if in my obsessive quest to protect my garden from destruction, I had laid waste to it myself.

Undeterred, I ordered a bug vacuum, again from Amazon, and tore open the packaging to reveal a sleek, motorized tube designed to suck pests directly off the plants. It felt efficient, almost hygienic, and I thought my daughter would appreciate that now their deaths would at least be less disgusting. I marched around the yard like a sharpshooter, vacuuming dozens of insects off the bark in satisfying, audible thuds. In just a few minutes I had filled the canister, and needed to empty the half-crushed creatures into their final resting place. Inside was a horror show: the paper filter had turned an oily, soot-grey, the canister packed tightly with a dense, mangled amalgam of dismembered legs, torn wings, and crushed abdomens. It was an impossible-to-clean throng of desecrated corpses, and the faint smell of sour sap wafted up as I disassembled the chamber. I hastily dumped out the remains of her potion from the Patron bottle and replaced it with a healthy glug of vinegar, and proceeded to pour the writhing mass into the glass grave.

I performed this routine dozens of times in the proceeding weeks, always careful to pour fresh vinegar and secure a lid to prevent escape. The glass slowly filled, forming a stratified record of their life cycle. At the bottom was the dense, dark sediment of early-stage nymphs—tiny black bodies flecked with white specks, partially dissolved in the amber liquid. Above them settled a middle layer of late-instar nymphs, larger and painted fire-engine red, slowly turning grey in the acid bath. The top layer was the thickest, a macabre stratum of fully grown adults. Their grey, spotted forewings sputtered feebly against the glass, their scarlet underwings flashing in brief, desperate bursts as they failed to escape the acidic slurry.

In short, I had created hell. Frequently I thought of Buddhist depictions of the non-elightened’s afterlife, which while less permanent, since you only have to burn off your bad Karma before ascending to another realm, contain punishments more suited to their sins than the standard torturing demons and lakes of fire in the Christian cosmology. In filling that glistening bottle of festering bodies, I often wondered how I would face retribution. It would take more than a pound of grapes, or a pound of flesh. I hoped that between my dying grape vine and haunting visions that I had enacted a poetic justice on myself, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that it would take more than this lifetime to balance the scales. 

It had been so easy to declare these insects the enemy. I used the militarized language of invaders to rationalize indulging in my own bloodlust. How readily I had defined these living creatures as vermin to justify their total eradication. Underneath the guise of stewardship and armed with overnight delivery, I had tapped into a dark, primal impulse to purge, to cleanse, to exert absolute, ruthless control over an environment that refused to submit to my will. 

But I never really had control. Tending to a thriving garden is not about control, it is about cultivation. My fight with the Lantern Flies was a sublimation of my own anxieties about living in a world where death looms behind every corner and drops its sticky sludge on every tender leaf. A world where people use these same machinations to carry out and justify atrocities against their own species. I am already trapped inside of that bottle, using the accumulated corpses of those beneath me in a futile attempt to escape, but only seeing the hatch briefly opened when it is time to pour more wounded bodies on top. 

When autumn finally arrived, bringing the first biting wind, the lingering adults slowed their advance. School started and I had less time for regular inspections, and the changing seasons blanketed the once verdant garden with brown, ubiquitous decay. I carried the heavy glass bottle to the far corner of the yard and dumped the dense, vinegary slurry deep into the compost heap. I watched the dark sludge dissolve into the rotting pile, letting the earth take back the corpses, absolve my sins, and transform them both into new life next year. Before turning off the water supply ahead of the first frost, I used the hose one last time to rinse the glass clean and left it sitting empty on the picnic table to catch the coming winter rain. 

Returning from school one afternoon, my daughter saw the bottle and approached it excitedly. She immediately emptied the contents of her pockets into it. That day’s trove of acorns and woodchips and scraps of paper settled on the bottom of the bottle, deposited with care and creating a delightful jingle as she swished the items around. She was disappointed when I told her that the hose was already turned off, but perked up when I told her that we could go on a bike ride before dinner. “It’s still a potion” she declared, even without the water. 

We went upstairs to grab her helmet and a snack. I found the jar of the home-grown raisins, a smaller yield than years before but still sweet and nourishing. I poured them into a small container and filled her water bottle. She offered to carry the water bottle down the stairs, because then we’d both have one thing to carry, and was proud that her load was heavier. Once we got downstairs she unscrewed the lid of the water bottle and delicately poured just enough water into the repurposed glass cauldron to cover the items she had placed there and, presumably, create magic. I handed her a small handful of raisins that we chewed in silence as the alchemy unfolded. 

“These are good, dad.” She declared, eyes still locked on the elixir.

“Thanks baby,” I replied. “They taste better when you share them.”