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July 2, 2025 
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 | By Neel V. Patel Staff Editor, Opinion |
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I became aware of spotted lanternflies the way Ernest Hemingway once described how bankruptcy happens: gradually, then suddenly. I was only dimly conscious of them for many years on the East Coast. And then suddenly, in 2022, they were everywhere, zipping through the hot summer with the kind of clumsy insectoid flight I’d only really observed from cicadas. I could see them crawling on sidewalks and the surfaces of buildings, occasionally flashing the bright red of their hind wings. And most distinctly, I remember seeing them absolutely swarm the trunks of trees around the city. We were told these insects feast on many kinds of plants, laying waste to them if they aren’t stopped.
But despite our best efforts to flatten spotted lanternflies under our shoes, as experts said we must, they have continued to spread across the country, threatening many more plant species and sending a nervous chill through the agriculture industry (especially California’s wine country). Stopping these bugs might require a more ambitious solution that may make people nervous: introducing a parasitic wasp in North America that feasts on lanternflies.
Using one organism to combat another, invasive one is called “biological control.” And humans have been doing some version of it for centuries. But as we start to see more and more invasive species descending on different parts of the world, the risks surrounding biological control start to feel more pronounced. The journalist Andrew Zaleski started out as a skeptic of biocontrol and was prepared to shine a light on why it seemed like an overreaching solution to an ecological problem. But over the course of his reporting for an Opinion guest essay, he realized that when done properly, biocontrol reflects the kind of optimal strategy that so many scientists champion: It’s effective without being so blatantly noticeable.
Read the guest essay:
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