Immediately, the insect is sucked backward into the container as if by a vacuum cleaner. ![]() As she demonstrates in one clip (which has nearly 200,000 likes), she places the mouth of the bottle over a lanternfly. Volker has devised a more elegant method, which she calls the “ bottle trick.” It only requires a plastic water bottle or takeout cup with a domed lid. ![]() Another, devised by insect researchers at Penn State, involves a complex DIY contraption made of a milk jug, mesh net, ziplock bag, and wooden stick. ![]() One involves encircling a tree with sticky tape (but the guide notes these could accidentally capture birds, and Volker has uploaded more than one video of lanternflies nonchalantly walking across the tape). The New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets pointed me to instructions on how to build lanternfly traps. There are, of course, plenty of advisories on how to get rid of lanternflies - most fall into the “step on it” camp - but the official messaging is surprisingly inconsistent and sometimes mind-boggling. (“Girl u be collecting them like Pokemon lmaoo,” writes one user.) The remainder are turned off by the anti-bug violence they “just can’t wrap their head around the fact that you have to be actively un-aliving these things left and right.” (She uses the word un-alive, she tells me, because TikTok’s algorithm will penalize her if she says the word kill.) (Some she hashtags #asmr.) The reactions she gets are about “85 percent positive,” she says. “There’s this little pop! sound when they go in, and it’s just beautiful,” she says. Sometimes, she doesn’t speak at all and the only audio is the muted sound of lanternflies falling into a trap. People like gross things.” Her videos are often just seconds long, up close (with just her hands in the frame), and overlaid with her cheerful, slightly raspy voice-over. “I do know that the ‘squick’ factor helps get viewers. Volker’s videos are meant to be informational, but she suspects that they’re compelling in the way that pimple-popping videos are. 1 spotted-lanternfly influencer on TikTok, where she has gained more than 56,000 followers and tens of millions of views on her videos. “There’s clearly a lack of education going on, so I was just like, Okay, I will become the person.” She deleted all the videos unrelated to lanternflies from her account and renamed it where she posted hundreds of clips about the lanternfly and a few other invasive insects. She began posting on TikTok in September 2021 with a seven-second clip of herself squishing a lanternfly with her bare hand. ![]() But when she noticed them at her favorite park, she decided, “I’m going to take care of this.” “I was outside screaming and stomping, because they were all over the hospital,” she says. A year later, Volker started seeing lanternflies at her job. Liv Volker, a 47-year-old Pennsylvania health-care worker, first learned about the spotted lanternfly in 2019 through her husband, who worked at a winery where the grapevines were covered with swarms of them. According to scientists, these invasive, inch-long assholes are out in full force right now, because they’ve reached adulthood and are starting to mate before laying eggs - typically in September. Spotted lanternflies - the insects that we collectively freaked out about last year - are everywhere now: hanging out on the sidewalk, clinging to railings, sitting in shrubs, fluttering their little brown-and-red spotted wings while destroying our trees and crops.
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