The spotted lanternfly: A major nuisance coming to Michigan backyards

TOLEDO, OHIO — Chris Wingard unwillingly shares his Ohio backyard with an infestation of spotted lanternfly, a nuisance pest of the particularly disgusting variety.

The colorful bugs hop around like locusts and swarm an invasive tree that grows widely across the Midwest. They excrete a sweet sap that rains down on anything and anyone below, molding the tree base and attracting wasps, hornets and yellow jackets.

“They’re almost like mutating cockroaches,” said Wingard, who lives on Dunham Street in Toledo. “At first there was a couple here and there. You’d smack them away and they were small. Now, they’re huge and they’re all over the place.”

“They’re really nasty.”

Wingard’s backyard foreshadows a plague that’s already pushing quietly into Michigan.

Spotted lanternfly are spreading north from Toledo. The bugs gained a foothold in Pontiac two years ago, although the infestation was contained. In 2024, they returned in greater numbers, prompting speculation that they’ve been here undetected for at least a year. In June, they were found in a Monroe County cemetery near the Ohio border. By September, they were turning up in Wayne and Oakland counties, too.

Thus far, the state has disclosed infestations at nine locations in three counties. The Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development (MDARD) surveyed 20 counties this year but hasn’t released many specifics yet. Pest experts in states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, where they first showed up a decade ago, say it’ll likely be a few years before lanternflies are buzzing thick in Michigan backyards, forests and farms.

Buckle up.

“There’ll be a mess of them everywhere,” said Brian Walsh, a lanternfly researcher at Penn State University Extension, who says the fat bug has captured lots of attention. “I’ve never seen this kind of public interaction with an invasive before.”

Pennsylvania is ground zero for the U.S. lanternfly invasion. From their 2014 emergence in Berks County, lanternflies have hitchhiked into 17 states and cut a path into our cultural consciousness. They were parodied on Saturday Night Live and have since inspired Halloween decorations, jewelry, strange new types of honey, civic campaigns imploring people to squish them and a subculture of those who just refuse to do it.

About three years after the initial discovery, the population in some Pennsylvania counties exploded, Walsh said. “You could actually see just piles of them in the sky, flying.”

“The term ‘biblical plague’ got used a lot.”

Vineyards at risk

Thankfully, spotted lanternfly aren’t tree killers on the order of, say, the emerald ash borer, a less noticeable pest which virtually decimated Michigan’s ash trees.

Lanternflies are a nuisance, but they don’t bite, Walsh said. They don’t cause structural damage to buildings. They aren’t going to physically hurt someone.

But they can cause some economic pain.

Lanternflies swarm and drill into a plant’s vascular system to feed on sap — stressing a plant and slowly killing it. The more they feed, the more “honeydew” they excrete and the sootier the ground becomes as their secretions grow mold and attract wasps.

Lanternflies feed on more than 70 different plants, including trees like black walnut, silver and red maple. The U.S. Department of Agriculture considers them a threat to “grape, tree fruit, stone fruit, maple syrup, tree nursery, and logging industries.”

Among the list of threatened plants are Michigan valuable specialty crops such as apples, cherries and peaches.

Grapes are in particular danger.

In 2019, Penn State researchers estimated the bug might drain least $324 million annually from Pennsylvania’s economy in both direct and indirect costs from lost crop value and decreased purchases from businesses that support growers.

Those economic impact projections haven’t been updated, but grape growers were estimated to get hit the worst — drained roughly $8 million statewide.

In soon-to-be-published study, researchers at Cornell University have estimated that grape growers in the Lake Erie and Finger Lakes regions of New York could face escalating drops in crop price and yield — up to 10 percent in the third year after an infestation takes hold. Those hits can be reduced by efforts to control the bug, they concluded.

Case studies show lanternfly impact can vary by vineyard based on infestation levels, weather, overall vine health and other pests.

Claudia Schmidt, a Penn State food systems researcher, said some vineyards experienced significant crop losses but growers also learned how to battle lanternflies through targeted pesticide spraying and other measures, such as vine netting.

“Each vineyard might be impacted differently,” she said.

Jessica Youngblood feels like it’s only a matter of time before lanternflies arrive at her Macomb County vineyard and winery, Youngblood Vineyards. The vineyard hosts a trap that is checked regularly — one of dozens across southern Michigan.

“It’s not like they can’t be killed,” said Youngblood. “But it’s the cost or spraying and just having to use more chemicals, which I don’t think any of us love.”

Hops is another Michigan vine plant in danger.

“It’s going to be costly. It’s going to be a nuisance,” said Tim Harrison, a graduate student researcher studying spotted lanternfly at Michigan State University. “I don’t expect major losses, but there is going to be an adaptation.”

Primary host is a hard to control invasive tree

Harrison knelt in front of a Toledo tree crawling with lanternflies. Wasps and hornets buzzed around the base, which was black with sooty fungus growing on insect secretions.

“This kind of infestation is what we can expect in metro Detroit, Grand Rapids, Kalamazoo — in cities throughout southern lower Michigan, as well as in rural areas,” he said.

“It’s the new future — a glimpse into a black, sooty mess.”

Although grapes don’t tend to grow in urban Michigan backlots, tree-of-heaven does. Lanternflies love tree-of-heaven, a native of China which is invasive itself in the United States. The tall, fast-growing tree thrives in poor soil, tolerates drought and pollution, and is common in urban lots and alleys, and along easements, railroad tracks and highway corridors.

Controlling tree-of-heaven is difficult. It spreads very easily and cutting down the hydra-like species stimulates new root sprouts, which can produce seed in just a couple years. Methodical, systemic herbicide treatments are necessary.

Some Michigan parks have already begun removing them. The 14,000-acre Huron-Clinton Metroparks system in metro Detroit has been surveying and removing the tree-of-heaven stands using a $30,000 state grant.

“Now is the time to evaluate and see if you have host plants like tree-of-heaven that need to be managed and dealt with now, before the arrival,” said Amy Stone with Ohio State University Extension in Lucas County, home to Toledo. “If you can manage levels at lower populations rather than having to experience an outbreak, that’s going to be a good thing.”

Although lanternflies have wings, they’re clumsy fliers and aren’t traveling long distances by themselves. The interstate and intercity spread is happening along transportation routes. New outbreaks are frequently confirmed near interstate railyards.

They will jump from area to area “as they get deposited by interstate trade,” Harrison said.

Cars, campers, trucks and trains are moving the bugs and their eggs masses, which look like bumpy smears of dry mud. Ohio isn’t the only nearby state presenting an invasion vector. Lanternflies have been found in Indiana counties which border Michigan, and also Chicago.

Thus far, they haven’t appeared outside southeast Michigan.

“We see a corridor basically going from Toledo right along the shoreline; along the freeways up into metro Detroit,” said Rob Miller, invasive species specialist at MDARD.

Quarantine policies which involve vehicle inspections and which restrict movement of certain plants and goods from infested areas have been established in states like Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Maryland. California, the country’s foremost grape-growing state, put a proactive quarantine in place in 2021.

Michigan so far does not have a quarantine. For now, officials are using local invasive species management programs called CISMAs to educate municipalities, plant nurseries, garden clubs, grower association and other groups likely to be affected.

In Pontiac, where the bugs first arrived two years ago, officials say one of the more successful strategies for containing the bugs at the county wastewater plant where they were found was to designate “trap trees” — removing all but a select few male trees-of-heaven and treating them with insecticide, which the bugs ingest via tree sap.

The gameplan is to buy time for research to develop solutions.

“We’ve seen spotted lanternflies move pretty quickly across a fair chunk of the country,” said Miller. “I don’t think eradication has been successful in any region of any state.”

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