[OC] The spread of Lanternflies. Accumulated observations on Inaturalist The first day of every year starting in 2019 and ending yesterday, Oct 6, 2025.
Posted by Swanlafitte
![[OC] The spread of Lanternflies. Accumulated observations on Inaturalist The first day of every year starting in 2019 and ending yesterday, Oct 6, 2025.](https://www.byteseu.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/mysf9emd9ptf1-1495x1536.gif "[OC] The spread of Lanternflies. Accumulated observations on Inaturalist The first day of every year starting in 2019 and ending yesterday, Oct 6, 2025.")
[OC] The spread of Lanternflies. Accumulated observations on Inaturalist The first day of every year starting in 2019 and ending yesterday, Oct 6, 2025.
Posted by Swanlafitte
15 Comments
I took frames from [A Community for Naturalists · iNaturalist](https://www.inaturalist.org/) . Using the filter I could limit the date. I used the first of the year for all frames but the last. The last frame was yesterday. I then created a GIF.
This is a cool set of data on iNaturalist. The visualization effort is low, screenshots and a gif maker. Just send us the links.
sooo…. how long until they fully take over?
These are different from Fireflies?
Next show em the water bottle trick
They’ve obviously expanded in region but anecdodally, there have been *far* less of these stupid flies around over the past couple of years so whatever theyve used to get rid of them seems to be working.
Some birds have figured out that the red on their wings is a lie and they aren’t poisonous so hopefully the population stops growing so fast
Huge confound bias from increasing number of iNaturalist users (from 300 to 30000). Any data, why it firstly observed at Philadelphia?
Thank you. I live in the SE corner of Virginia, and this is helpful for me to understand why I hear so much about them but haven’t been seeing them. Also makes clear we are far from off the hook for upcoming years.
How is this data collected
Oh, wonderful, I’ve been dealing with these god damned Brown Marmorated Stinkbugs invading my house for the past 6 years, and now there’s another wave of invasive bugs? Great.
Well looks like we can commence squashing in Michigan next year!
I live close to where it started in Eastern PA. In our neighborhood, we had a few in 2017, a bazillion in 2018, a few in 2019, and since then… not one. I don’t know what got them all, but it shows that everyone else at least has hope.
In Finland we nowadays get [deer keds](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lipoptena_cervi), which didn’t use to exist when I was a kid. Found this map of spread https://binary.pensoft.net/fig/351083/oo/file.jpg , although it is not quite accurate, as these are seen in up to northern Finland already.
Would love to see a deer ked vs lanternfly comparison.
There are so many that I step on. They love my grape vines, which I am now considering removing