Murderous alliances have been formed on the University of Maryland’s campus. Students who spend time outside always needed to defend themselves against mosquitos, seasonal cicadas and bees, but recently a new threat has arisen — the spotted lanternfly.
The invasive bugs were first found in the U.S. in 2014, according to the Department of Agriculture’s website. They feed on a variety of plants and can further harm them by producing a fluid that “promotes sooty mold growth.”
A sense of duty taps me on the shoulder whenever I come across a lanternfly every three steps. I look a bit crazed as I try to catch the one flying away from me, but I want to do my best to be a righteous civilian. Even though I wasn’t able to donate to that GoFundMe I saw, I can still do my part to help get rid of these pests.
Freshman psychology major Alexis Yonkers recounted walking on the sidewalk — or more accurately, a graveyard of lanternflies — adding to the body count with the bottom of her shoe.
“They’re like dumbass cicadas, they’ll just fly straight at you,” Yonkers said.
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Andzelika Berestko, a fine arts graduate student, describes the bug squishing as “doing a dance” when she spots people stomping left and right on the ground. She said when she used to work in New York, she’d see people there brushing the bugs off their clothes.
“It almost became this cultural agreement,” Berestko said. “Like we are linking hands to kill them.”
But Berestko believes the casualness about killing the bugs is quite jarring.
She said personal beliefs prevent her from killing bugs, such as mosquitos, but acknowledged the suggestions from scientists to do so with the lanternflies.
In turn, I started questioning myself when catching glimpses of crushed wings attached to red-smeared marks on the sidewalk. Why did I abandon my empathy to execute a kill order I didn’t even fully understand?
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Freshman psychology major Rorie Allen said she learned about the lanternfly problem from a family member working in nature conservation.
“Yeah, it’s a huge problem,” Allen recounted her family member saying. “It’s not so much anymore because the birds and the bats are finally starting to eat them.”
According to the University of Maryland Extension’s website, natural enemies of the spotted lanternfly include various bugs such as spiders, stink bugs and assassin bugs, as well as birds.
Brian Walsh, a horticulture educator at Penn State Extension and longtime studier of spotted lanternflies, characterizes the campaign to kill them to be blown out of proportion, according to a Vox article from 2022.
“We’re not going to eradicate them,” Walsh said in the article. “We need to look at this as more of a chronic problem.”
I realized the murderous rhythm in my feet was fueled by self-indulgence rather than an informed conservation effort. But the birds and wildlife can’t catch them all, so it still feels permissible to take action with our feet on our day-to-day walks to help protect the environment.
