17 seconds with …A Spotted Lanternfly

 Face-to-face with the stylish invasive species. So do I smoosh it or not?

- MATTHEW SCHNEIER

OFFICE-BOUND, I had company. In the humid wedge of a revolving door, a guest had pushed in with me. He (I think “he,” though I didn’t turn him over to check for the female’s telltale red valvifers at the distal end of the abdomen) froze when he sensed I saw him, playing dead. It was an uncomfortable moment. Was the security guard staring?

My passenger, all one inch of him, was a Lycorma delicatula, a spotted lanternfly. If you’ve spent any time at ground level, you know the type. We’re crawling with them. They are new(ish) New Yorkers, your flighty, frustrating neighbors. Like novices, out-of-towners, they go slowly, clogging the pavement. You roll your eyes, tap a foot to clear a path—nothing. You could kill them. The City of New York wishes you would.

Just two years ago, the bugs arrived in the big city, overdressed and a little dumb. Spotted (nearly leopard print) as the name suggests but not, in fact, a fly, the spotted lanternfly has two sets of wings, its underset brilliant red, a cape like something André Leon Talley might have worn—finery to be displayed at moments of danger to warn or to intimidate. But they are also slow-moving, weak-flying, crowd-tending—a plague of doofuses. You have to wonder if they are, if they can really be, serious.