northeast-flora-and-fauna

At Duke Farms Pop-up Education stands, we've been talking quite a bit about Spotted Lanternflies , and have started to see them in their 1st instar form. Tonight I did a few web searches to try and answer a question that's come up a few times: Does the Spotted Lanternfly need to feed on a Tree of Heaven to complete its life cycle? Here's what I found: Both this Penn State article and this National Park Service article  state that Tree of Heaven is not required for Spotted Lanternflies to complete their life cycle (and thus reproduce). But while this Nature article confirms that Tree of Heaven isn't necessary for them to reproduce, it says that Spotted Lanternflies produce only 1/7th of the egg masses when they don't feed on Tree of Heaven. That's an 86% reduction! They note that the smaller egg masses don't seem to be any less healthy. They speculate that without TOH to eat, SFLs take longer to develop into adults. If true, the effectiveness of removing TO...