Have Americans Been Mercilessly Squashing a Creepy Bug for Nothing?
Updated April 7, 2022, at 10:58 a.m.
Squashing spotted lanternflies isn’t always easy. Maybe that’s obvious. Maybe you’ve tried it, after encountering kill-on-sight orders. The dotted, mothlike bugs tend to hop, after all, sometimes narrowly escaping the (almost) perfectly timed thud of a sneaker. So when you get one, you celebrate.
“See ’em? SQUISH ’EM!” reads one tweet, complete with a trophy photo of two bug carcasses stuffed inside tiny glass jars. “I KILLED A SPOTTED LANTERNFLY!!!” another exclaims. And another: “I can honestly say that’s the biggest adrenaline rush I’ve had all 2020.”
Haters have organized “squishathons” and spotted-lanternfly-killing pub crawls. “It’s kind of a crusade,” according to Brad Line, who lives in Pennsylvania. He developed an app called Squishr, which ranks users’ spotted-lanternfly kills, complete with gory photos as evidence, on a national leaderboard.
The motive for attacks of such self-congratulatory glee—and such careful viciousness—is supposed to be a dire environmental prognosis, our belief that the spotted lanternfly is a, according to the latest research, has perhaps contributed to its reputation as an indiscriminate life-drainer. “If you see thousands of these very large insects feeding on your tree, then the first thought you’re going to have is ,” Brian Walsh, a Penn State Extension educator, told me. Yet in the eight years since the bugs first made American backyards their home, some of the most shocking damage has come not from spotted lanternflies themselves, but from overzealous (and very human) attempts to stop them.
