WHILE YOU’RE HERE… If you learned something from this story, pay it forward and become a member of Spotlight PA so someone else can in the future at /donate. A recent article in The Atlantic raises doubts.But the bug is still definitely on the move, and experts are warning Pennsylvanians to check their cars before they travel for signs of hangers-on. Whether citizen-led bounties have really made a dent in the lanternfly population or prevented the kind of damage officials warned about is up for debate. Spotted lanternfly quarantines are currently in place in 45 of 67 counties statewide. Line said there were no “squishes” reported in any counties not already under related quarantines, making the data gleaned redundant. The Department of Agriculture said aside from sample data received prior to its launch, no data was ever received from the app. The state’s Department of Agriculture told PA Local that the first kill-on-sight orders for the non-native species went out soon after.The premise of the Squishr app, inspired by Line’s children and the Litterati platform, was simple: incentivize the eradication of a potentially destructive pest and share data with state officials that could help track its spread in real-time. in Pennsylvania - Berks County to be exact - in 2014. (Line, a director of technology for a financial services firm, said he does not make any money off Squishr.)The spotted lanternfly, an Obama-era holdover, was first found in the U.S. His app, which has been updated and made more user-friendly since launching, is also gaining ground in western Pennsylvania, a newish frontier, and to a lesser extent Maryland. It’s “roughly a 50/50 split between Pennsylvania and northern New Jersey / New York” now, Line explained. Roughly 90% of user posts on the Squishr app back in 2020 were from Pennsylvania, with only a few in northern New Jersey. (Billy Penn shares a few theories as to why.) Her passion for lanternfly smashing was only turbo-charged by the leaderboards and shared purpose found on the Squishr app, which launched in 2019, months before pandemic lockdowns took hold and left more people, like Campbell, staring at their walls as this reviled - yet surprisingly photogenic - bug moved in.īut the reason for the decline in Pennsylvania usage of the app is, to Campbell’s point, most likely due to the fact that the bug’s presence in the most populous part of the state - Philadelphia and its collar counties - has dropped sharply. (The trick, according to Campbell, is standing behind the bugs, prolific jumpers themselves, and heading them off by bringing the swatter down from the front.) And then it became sort of an OCD thing and a passion.”Ĭampbell said she walked a half mile in a single day along her apartment’s wraparound porch chasing the bugs - her weapon of choice, a flyswatter, clenched tightly in her fist. And so, you know, I just started whacking them. I had recently retired and they were driving me crazy. “At one point they were all over the windows and walls, like soldiers marching. (She says she remains in the all-time top three.)Ĭampbell acknowledges her body count is down these days but says it isn’t apathy as much as opportunity: Her condominium removed several trees and the bugs just aren’t around like they used to be. At one point she was among the app’s most prolific users and amassed an astounding 13,000-plus confirmed kills. Harriet Campbell, a retiree in Plymouth Meeting, Montgomery County, is that woman. Harriet Campbell Harriet Campbell's bucket of dead spotted lanternflies on her balcony in Plymouth Meeting, Pa.
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