Fungus and Lanternflies

Just thought this was an interesting article regarding possibly controlling the spread of lanternflies since more and more observations of lanternflies in Pennsylvania are showing up on iNat.

https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2019/04/destructive-plant-pest-thwarted-two-native-fungi

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The Fig 1 pics in https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/04/24/1903579116 are really cool, showing the fungi sprouting out of the insects.

Edit: Hm, Batkoa (the one that sticks them to trees) has no iNat observations yet: https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/340634-Batkoa

However, I remember running across at least 2 US lanternfly obs where I think the description was like, “dead, stuck to the tree”. I hope people will go looking for more of these as the season gets underway!

Edit 2: Found the records, but unfortunately the bodies are not in position to observe any anchoring fungus, if present:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/22472836
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/22472782

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Thanks for finding these observations and linking–I hadn’t see them. It would be cool if iNat could get some observations of lanternflies affected by fungus. I saw in the study that the fungus killed off most of the lanternflies before many of the females laid eggs as well.

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