By now, spotted lanternflies are a familiar, if unwelcome sight for many in western Pennsylvania. As adults, their distinctive tan and red wings, dotted with black, are unmistakable as they hop from plant to plant or gather on streetlights.
Native to Asia, the insects were first spotted in eastern Pennsylvania a decade ago and have spread across the state. The pests feed on sap, and many worry their spread could endanger the regional grape and wine industries.
But for Michelle Duennes, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Biology at Saint Vincent College, spotted lanternflies present an opportunity.
A couple of years ago, she co-founded the Spotted Lanternfly Invasion Archive with Al McDonnell, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Biochemistry at Chatham University.
“We want to build a historical collection that is a DNA museum and molecular museum of their presence here and how they’re changing over time,” Duennes said.
It’s a citizen science project, and the researchers are looking for participants in four western Pennsylvania counties: Allegheny, Butler, Washington and Westmoreland.
The Allegheny Front’s Kara Holsopple spoke with Duennes and McDonnell about it.
LISTEN to their conversation:
Kara Holsopple: How did this project come about?
Michelle Duennes: I had a student join my research lab to do her senior capstone project at St Vincent, and she wanted to study genetics and insects. And so I was like, ‘Well, there’s this insect coming — it’s sort of here already — called spotted lanternfly.’ I didn’t know much about it at the time. And I said, ‘We could probably get enough of those for you to do a small population genetics study.’
But Clare (Mulcahy) didn’t have a car, so we started soliciting help from the community, and that’s how Al got involved. We played roller derby together. Our roller derby team collected a lot of them for us, and a lot of people in the community were super interested because there was a lot of news about them.
As I saw that there was so much interest in this, I thought maybe this could turn into a community citizen science project involving this invasive species as it continues to expand its range. Claire’s project evolved into a pilot study to see how could we actually do lab work with them once people got us the bugs — and we could.
Kara Holsopple: Al, what’s your interest?
Al McDonnell: I had gotten a job at Chatham University, where part of their mission is sustainability. So my thought was I could make a biochemistry lab that’s very sustainable and has to do with the community with the spotted lanternflies that folks collect. We could take it a step further and even have the students do the collection and perform the research.
So, I came on board to develop a lab and also to do biochemical studies on the flies themselves. Because I’m not an entomologist, I have never worked with insects before. It’s very new terrain for me. We brought some botanists on board that are also at Chatham University because my student is very interested in plants and which plants the spotted lanternfly likes. So we’re going to get into the nitty-gritty of what they eat and maybe get rid of what they eat.
So, if you’re looking at small trees, that’s where you’ll find the nymph stage of the spotted lanternfly, and fully mature trees are where you find the adults.
Kara Holsopple: What do they eat?
Al McDonnell: They really like tree of heaven, as everyone knows. But there are so many more plants that we’re finding them on. Porcelain berry is something that we were warned about by a colleague at Penn State.
While that is definitely true, we’re seeing them on vine plants; my student has also been noticing them and a lot of native saplings. Anything that fruits essentially. So, if you’re looking at small trees, that’s where you’ll find the nymph stage of the spotted lanternfly, and fully mature trees are where you find the adults. Unfortunately, it has been a lot of native trees as of late. We found them on a lot of magnolia trees.
Kara Holsopple: As you mentioned, this is a citizen science or community science project. How does it work?
Michelle Duennes: We are asking people to go out and collect bugs for us. So if you sign up online, you will receive a kit in the mail. We might do some drop-off and pick-up points if we can get those coordinated, but you’ll likely receive a kit in the mail. That kit will have instructions on how to catch them and how to kill them, and a tube that you will put rubbing alcohol in with the bugs.
Last year, we sent out one tube and had people collect five males and females. There’s also a guide on how to identify the males from the females. It’s actually pretty easy. The females have a red spot on the tip of their abdomen and the males don’t. We had people collect those right into ethanol. If you don’t want to put the bugs right into the alcohol, you can put them in the freezer. Once they’ve been euthanized, you can put them in the tube.
But we’re also going to ask people this year to collect dead ones that they see. We need fresh specimens pickled in alcohol for doing DNA and other extractions. But, as I’m sure a lot of people are noticing, their numbers in Pittsburgh do not seem actually to be that high this year, which has been surprising for me and all of us.
There will be a separate tube for putting the ones you find dead that aren’t squished, so we can kind of do a postmortem on them and see if we can figure out what happened to them.
Kara Holsopple: What are some tips for collecting them?
Al McDonnell: We have a website now that one of my students worked on all summer and there is a really fun tab called “Tips and Tricks for Collection.” So Penn State has a trap that they have already published and we linked it on the website. It is something that you can make from found recyclable materials and it is not expensive to make either. And it is something that you could trap them and then collect them for our actual experimentation where they’re not going to be smushed either. So it’s perfect.
Michelle Duennes: It’s called a circle trap. It takes advantage of their behavior of climbing up the trees. And so it’s got like two sticks and then some mesh that you wrap around the trees and kind of funnels them up into a bag that you put at the top. Then they’re unable to get out.
Spotted Lanternflies Are About to Hatch. Learn How to Make a Trap for this Invasive Insect.
Kara Holsopple: When people return the samples to you, what do you do with them?
Michelle Duennes: You shouldn’t mail flammable alcohol in the regular mail. So we will have several drop off points throughout the counties that we are working in. Then those specimens go into the lab.
One thing we’ll be doing with them is pulling the wings off and looking at wing pattern variation, not just in the veins in their wings that get blood into them so that they can fly, but also the spots on their wings. Research at Penn State has shown that you can identify an individual spotted lanternfly by the spotting pattern on its wings.
So we pull the wings off, put them on microscope slides and image them to look at differences in wing patterns based on geography and where those samples have come from.
Kara Holsopple: What are you looking for there? What’s the question you’re trying to answer?
Michelle Duennes: We want to add to the knowledge that helps mitigate the damage that they’re doing to the environment. But this project is about a lot more than that. It’s also about using this opportunity of a brand new invasion and studying it from the very, very beginning and watching as it changes over time. They’re likely not going to ever go away forever. I mean, honestly, who knows? They could.
This population, these low population numbers we’re seeing in Pittsburgh, I didn’t expect that. And I don’t think others did either. And it’s not happening in other places. So who knows what’s going to happen in the future to them? But we want to track it.
With the wing pattern variation, because you can map an individual or maybe even look at patterns in populations, it’s not unlikely to think that populations might have completely different stressors that are causing them to evolve in different counties.
Like we have Westmoreland and we have Allegheny County as part of this, and we’ve just expanded too, to Washington and Butler. But the seasonality there is very different. I live in Pittsburgh and I work in St. Vincent and something that’s always struck me since I moved here is how different the weather can be on a single day in Pittsburgh versus St. Vincent. That’s because of the Laurel Highlands.
And there’s some climate modeling that’s been done with spotted lanternflies that shows that the adults might emerge a full month later in the Laurel Highlands than they do in Pittsburgh. And those different things, the different types of habitat, the different food, all of these different climate and biotic factors might cause independent evolution of these groups.
We don’t know if it will, but. I’m really excited to see if it does happen. And so the wing stuff is more of a long-term goal to see if maybe we can look at morphological variation and how it varies based on the differing environmental factors and in these different areas throughout western Pennsylvania.
Al McDonnell: One of the beautiful things about working with the spotted lanternfly is that we can use the entire spotted lanternfly to do research. So after we take the wings off, I can then do things with the body. One of the main things that we’re looking at this year is the gut. So I’m going to be along with students extracting the gut, smashing it up, and then extracting the DNA. The hope is that we can figure out what they’ve been consuming.
We’re hoping to do a study on plants that they could be consuming, bacteria that could be in the gut as well as fungi. One of the things that we think could be killing the spotted lanternfly randomly is fungi. That’s why we want the dead ones if you find them dead. In addition, it could be a bacteria. We’re not quite sure and we don’t exactly know what they carry either.
Kara Holsopple: And you’re looking for adult samples, which are what are out right now.
Michelle Duennes: We’re looking for adult samples currently. We’re still in the very early years of this. And as the bugs change, the project will change with them, so we might start collecting nymphs.
Michelle Duennes of Saint Vincent College and Al McDonnell of Chatham University are co-founders of the Spotted Lanternfly Invasion Archive. Photo: Kara Holsopple / The Allegheny Front
Kara Holsopple: Over the last couple of years, people have been told, been trained, to squish lantern flies to stop their spread. Should we still be doing that?
Al McDonnell: Yes. We should still be killing them. I fully support the killing of the spotted lanternfly, but I also highly recommend you collect them for us. So if you happen to have a home address that has lots of spotted lanternflies, kill all of the other ones, but save five of each, male and female, for us.
Kara Holsopple: What is something that people don’t know about spotted lanternflies?
Al McDonnell: I keep being asked if folks can eat them. My first answer was, I don’t know because in theory, it is a bug. We can eat bugs and it looks like it’s chock full of protein. That is a question I hope to answer this year. Actually, that is one of my big questions with a master’s student.
What types of proteins do they have? We haven’t really done protein studies on them. It’s a lot more difficult to collect them for that. So can we eat them? Don’t eat them. We don’t know what they’ve consumed.
And because they will consume things that are poisonous to us, such as tree of heaven, don’t do it. I feel like maybe eventually if we find out that it’s okay, that could be neat, like with crickets. But I don’t I don’t think it’s going to be the next protein powder supplement.
Kara Holsopple: They are very substantial.
Michelle Duennes: So after about ten minutes of watching my dog try to eat them last year and thinking it was funny, I realized these things are red and black. They have warning coloration. Why are you letting your dog eat them? So I went online like a good scientist does, and I read about any toxic compounds they sequester. They do sequester cytotoxic compounds from tree of heaven.
Luckily, my dog was fine because I don’t have any tree of heaven in my yard. But birds are also learning that they can eat them. That might be another reason we might be seeing lower numbers.
And we’ve also heard anecdotally from other participants and other community members that they’re seeing birds eat them because they really only sequester toxic compounds from one species. Most of them aren’t toxic, so you’re probably going to see those fledgling birds that ate one last year and didn’t throw up learn that they can eat them. But people shouldn’t eat them.
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Michelle Duennes, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Biology at Saint Vincent College, and Al McDonnell, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Biochemistry professor at Chatham University are co-founders of the Spotted Lanternfly Invasion Archive. This season, they are also asking participants within Allegheny, Butler, Washington and Westmoreland counties to photograph spotted lanternflies at any life stage and upload the images to the iNaturalist site or app.
