Spotted Lanternfly
Lycorma delicatula · True bugs
Spotted Lanternfly nymphs
Brooklyn Botanic Garden, 17 June 2026
Spotted Lanternfly nymphs on a stem in the Botanic Garden in June. The species is an invasive planthopper from Asia, first found in Pennsylvania in 2014 and now well established around New York, where it feeds on tree of heaven, grapevines and a number of ornamentals.
Black with white spots is the second and third instar; by the fourth they gain the red patches that make the adult look different enough that it is easy not to recognise it as the same insect. The advice everywhere it turns up is still to kill it on sight.
Spotted Lanternfly
Brooklyn Botanic Garden, 21 July 2024
A Spotted Lanternfly on a leaf in the Botanic Garden, a planthopper from China that arrived in Pennsylvania in 2014 and has since spread through the Northeast. In New York it lives wherever tree of heaven grows, which is every vacant lot and railway cutting in the city.
Not a fly at all. The hindwings' red and black are a flash warning, kept hidden under the spotted grey forewings until the insect is disturbed into showing them. Its favourite host is tree of heaven, another Chinese import, which is why the two are so often found together on a city street.
Birds, insects, plants and other wildlife, mostly from Brooklyn, with some from further afield.
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