I had never seen one until this season. Now see quite a few on them at my local. Should we tree growers be worried about the spotted lanternfly? Will they hurt our fruit trees?
no. The only thing they damage is grape vines really. Get some orchard ducks if youre worried and they’ll help lol. But yeah they havent been shown to actually damage trees.
Anecdotally, in year 4 now of spotted lantern flies the amount of them decreases each year as corvids learn to eat them and other bugs.
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I have observed this starting to happen. I see a lot of wings in pots that sit near my grape vines where the lantern flies are concentrated. Previous years had a lot more of them on my grapes without ever seeing any leftover wings, similar to when we have large cicada broods and cicada wings are left all around the garden.
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They are basically on all of the plants here included potted plants just not in mass I don’t see the black sooty mold that you will find on Tree of Heaven and grape vines. I had to remove a grape vine because it was covered in black mold from the sticky honeydew they excrete.
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you dont need to remove plants covered in this, it will be fine it just is unsightly, in a few years they wont be as much of an issue
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This last year I had about half of the previous year which itself was the second really bad year. They set back the plants a bit but not enough to really notice. I never had any of the black mold even though I had many shoots that were literally wall to wall nymphs.
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Dont allow tree of heaven to grow on your land or anywhere near it.. encourage birds and bats, insects and spiders and wasps etc..
Not much if anything wants to eat a spotted lanternfly that has consumed the toxins of TOH.
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Dang- another reason to hate the tree of heaven. I really try to not demonize plants, but the TOH does seem like a problem plant.
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Four years of declining numbers as corvids and other birds catch on is actually reassuring. Guessing it takes a while for local predators to figure out a new food source. The grape vine damage and the mold from honeydew sound like the real concern, not so much the fruit trees.
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I remember seeing on the news last year that they were threatening the finger lakes wine industry. I’m not sure how much that panned out. I saw a lot on my grape vines last year and this and they actually produced a small but decent crop for the first time this year. For my fruit trees they cause effectively zero damage. they also seem to level off within 3-4 years of appearing in an area. Hopefully it’s not a cycle and more of a steady state.
They seem to be predated on by a mix of birds as well predatory insects. I’ve seen them get caught in the webs of the orb weaver spiders that hang out near my house. There are also reports of certain fungi that kill them.
I don’t think they will be the long term threat that they were thought of initially. Even for grapes
Definitely try to get rid of any ailanthus/toh near where you are. My neighbor 3 doors down has some massive toh, which I’m sure is contributing to the slfs I see near my house.
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