A friend of mine sent me a post in a gardening group on Facebook that said that lantern flies are dying when they suck the juices from milkweed. It’s their last meal. So, it’s another reason to plant more milkweed. And, it makes sense. These bugs are new to this continent, and they don’t know what the good food is and what will kill them. They must use trail and error. Let’s all put up little signs on the milkweed: “Free meal for lantern flies!”
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Oh this will be popular with New York.
Are there not milkweed species within their native range? Or are only some New World milkweeds toxic to them? If milkweed is in fact toxic, then presumably there will be selective pressure to avoid these food plants.
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The effect of milkweed on SLF has been rumored for a while, but evidence has been lacking. As far as I can tell this work is currently in the pilot stage, see:
https://projects.sare.org/sare_project/lne25-494r/
So, milkweed might have an effect on SLF, but there’s a lot more work ahead to provide robust evidence. That said, there’s probably not much downside to most folks to planting milkweed, but I wouldn’t count on it to protect things from SLF yet (especially as milkweed generally takes a few years to really get going).
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Judging by the number of insects that feed on it, it’s not.
But the question remains if Common Milkweed is consumed by and also toxic to SLF, which might be possible if the insect has not encountered it before.
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Many milkweeds have evolved chemical protection against herbivores (cardenolides and other cardiac glycosides), but specific insects like the ones you are thinking of have evolved to still be able to eat milkweeds. I am not sure about spotted lantern flies, but they certainly did not evolve to eat species in the genus Ascepias, as it not native to anywhere near their natural range. However, there are other plants that have covergently evolved the same/similar cardiac glycosides, so maybe they have some resistance?
Agrawal, Anurag A. (2012). “Toxic cardenolides: chemical ecology and coevolution of specialized plant-herbivore interactions”. New Phytologist. 194 (1): 28–45. doi:10.1111/j.1469-8137.2011.04049.x. PMID 22292897.
Dobler, S., Dalla, S., Wagschal, V., & Agrawal, A. A. (2012). Community-wide convergent evolution in insect adaptation to toxic cardenolides by substitutions in the Na,K-ATPase. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109(32), 13040–13045. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1202111109
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