Rustle. Rustle. Flash of red.
I shuddered walking down Hillhouse Ave, recalling that battlefield, that slaughterhouse. My fingers balled up deep within my pockets. There was no undoing what I had just done. The splayed legs, the awkwardly craned neck parts. I could imagine the crimson path I left as I walked—bloodied stains on the soles of my sneakers stamping the pavement with each step I took.
It was just a lanternfly, I repeated like a mantra. I’m supposed to squish them. But the finality of murder weighed heavily upon me.
I’m a killer.
The spotted lanternfly is a beautiful creature. Introduced from the forests of East Asia, they are roughly the size of your thumb joint and marked with dots resembling bled-out ink at the tips. Viewed from the side, the lanternfly looks like a pink-tan teardrop. In resting position, their wings fold up side-by-side like a moth; unfurled, they are a flare of black, white, and red.
Striking as they are, lanternflies are invasive to the Northeast. They are incredibly fecund insects that deposit thousands of eggs in camouflaged masses. Given time and ample food, spotted lanternflies can quickly overrun an ecosystem.
Governmental agencies across the Northeast, like the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, began recommending people destroy egg masses and report sightings to curb their spread. Killing lanternflies became sensationalized: a quick TikTok search for “crushing lanternflies” reveals hundreds, if not more, short clips of environmental vigilantism. But not everyone caught on. In 2022, Bobbi Wilson was stopped by the police as she exterminated spotted lanternflies with a homemade concoction of water, dish soap, and apple cider vinegar. Wilson was only nine years old at the time — and Black. Wilson’s exterminating, and the subsequent media storm around her encounter with the police, granted her fame and prompted several interviews and an invitation for her to come visit the Yale School of Public Health. Wilson’s spotted lanternfly specimens, carefully pinned and labeled, remain on display in the Peabody Museum’s collections today.
As an aspiring ecologist, I was inspired by Wilson’s act of young bravery. I followed climate and environmental news closely, despite living in Los Angeles, thousands of miles away from the nearest lanternfly infestation. Amidst an internet dive on the issue, I came across a video of children killing the mottled lanternflies by the dozens. The tree bark rippled with the fluttering and shuffling of dull-gray wings. The children were smiling as they pulverized the insects with their little shoes. They grinned ear to ear, proudly displaying the spoils of their playground menacing. I was horrified and fully enraptured.
Few bugs have met their end on my account. Frankly, I always hated the sound and the mere thought of the crushed insects’ texture. It felt immoral and disgusting, even, to subject any lifeform to torture and subsequent disintegration. With the exception of mosquitos. Those could die.
My aversion to extermination created a pastime that filled my windowsill and desk with bottles and jars. For years, I built microbiomes for roly-polies, sometimes taking them out to hold and cradle their little bodies gently as they rocked back and forth in my palm. I had a mantis-raising stint for a couple of years in high school and wrote numerous college essays about how I don’t kill spiders. But fuzzy, googly-eyed arachnids are different from tree-sucking lanternflies. Spiders are inquisitive creatures that eliminate undesirable pests. Spotted lanternflies, on the other hand, are prolific, malignant bodies. As I crushed the latter, visions of the future — gloriously green and lanternfly-free — filled my mind. I was doing good for the world.
But it turns out my vigilantism may have been for naught. I spoke with Peabody staffer Nicole Palffy-Muhoray, Associate Director of Student Programs, and Larry Gall, Senior Collection Manager in the Entomology Division, for further insight on the usefulness and morality of my actions.
According to the entomologists, by the time the public knew about the spotted lanternflies and their havoc, it was already too late. “Once the news spread, [spotted lanternflies] were already well established. And because they eat so many different kinds of trees, we weren’t able to just track them to single locations and eradicate them in a single location,” Palffy-Muhoray said. “Killing one out of 10,000 is not really going to make a difference.”
Palffy-Muhoray told me that she had not killed any lantern flies — she didn’t “see the purpose” in doing it. “And even if there was a purpose, does that justify it to me? That’s not clear.”As we spoke, Gall and Palffy-Muhoray showed me the collection’s insectile artwork — made not of bugs, but from them. Butterfly and moth wings trimmed and glued into the vibrant image of two swooping cranes. Scarab beetles carved out and turned into gold jewelry. Even whole specimens themselves usually aren’t accumulated post-mortem. Collectors often go out with traps, nets, or an apparatus like a century-old Chinese rice wine bottle and return from the field with hauls of newly deceased critters. This freshness allows for a high-quality pinned specimen.
Something confused me about this approach; curators would not catch living mice or tear off songbird wings for display. This I easily chalked up to intelligence: birds and mammals are smart; insects are not. It feels more wrong to kill something that thinks or feels. While murder may be wrong regardless, killing a being of relatively higher cognition is, in a sense, a step closer to killing one of us. But Palffy-Muhoray disagrees. “The idea that [insects] are not intelligent is based essentially on only looking at intelligence when it’s similar to human intelligence. While they don’t have the same brain structure, that doesn’t mean that there’s no other path to some kind of higher cognition,” said Palffy-Muhoray. The research on the full extent of how insects think, feel, or perceive the world is catching up, but it’s slow.
Gall also mentioned that entomologists are unconcerned with collecting because insects are highly capable of reproducing. Ecologically, collecting a few specimens here and there has little impact on the population as a whole. Plus, insects have a rapid life cycle and are capable of producing numerous young, whereas vertebrates typically put more care and investment into their young. In that sense, Gall said, “The impact of doing sampling for research on insect populations is radically smaller than the same kind of approach on a vertebrate population.”
So, does having more offspring reduce the worth of each individual? Palffy-Muhoray’s best answer to my ethical perplexity was, “It’s complicated.” She continued, “People might buy vegetables with pesticides sprayed on them, but then they might not be willing to kill a lantern fly, and there’s sort of an inherent contradiction there, right? Or maybe people don’t like spiders, and they’ll kill a spider in their house, but they think the lanternfly is pretty so they don’t want to kill that. So I think it’s an endless conversation.”
Feeling desolate and unsatisfied, I trudged back down Science Hill. I passed by seven lanternflies (yes, I counted). Two had already met their flattened fates, now mere remnants of wings and leg-bits. The other five were wholly intact. With my iNaturalist mobile app, a budding ecologist’s staple, I snapped several pictures, tagged their location for other casual naturalists to see, and forced my feet to keep walking.
That night, I did what any Yale student deep in the trenches of existential and ethical crises would do — email a professor of moral philosophy and normative ethics. Shelly Kagan, Clark Professor of Philosophy at Yale, was congenial enough to speak with me on Zoom.
Kagan sees environmental ethics as a constant act of weighing various factors, akin to the costs and benefits of economics. In 2019, Kagan published his book, “How to Count Animals, More or Less,” which set forth a hierarchical view of life forms, one that places humans at the top and “lesser beings” such as insects at the bottom.
“When kids capture insects and then pull off the wings, we have this kind of knee-jerk reaction that [the act] is wrong,” Kagan said. I grimaced, remembering how it felt to step on that lanternfly. “Do [insects] count because they’re sentient, or are we projecting sentience on them in the absence of really good evidence?”
He then explained that, historically, the deliberation between what life forms “count” has broken down into three methods of thought: rationale, sentience, and agency. Rationality divides the objects of the universe into people and things, and things don’t count in their own right. “If you were to take a cat and douse it with gasoline and then light it on fire for the fun of watching it die, Kant has a hard time explaining what’s wrong with that,” Kagan said. “Most of us think there’s something wrong with that. And that suggests that we think that things can have moral standing or moral claims, even if they’re not rational beings.”
Sentience acknowledges that “things” that feel pleasure or, in the cat’s case, pain have moral standing. Kagan used an unnerving but effective example to express this to me. “Pull an arm off a squirrel…that’s going to cause agony to the squirrel, and if the squirrel would have gone on to have a tolerably pleasant squirrel life, not only have you caused the pain, but you’ve robbed it of all the pleasure that would have come its way. [Sentience] says squirrels count because they feel pleasure and pain.”
The third perspective, agency, is sympathetic toward all things with intention or purpose. Agency, loosely defined by Kagan, is how you want “your life to be going, what you want to be doing, what you want to be happening to you. [Like] having a will, as we might put it.” In this sense, the cat and the squirrel all have agency, as do snakes, flies, bacteria, and, yes, spotted lanternflies. While these lanternflies use their agency to destroy ecosystems, the basis of that destruction is survival. And people kill for survival all the time—they cut down trees for shelter, they kill elk for hide, they uproot vegetables for consumption. Things deemed nuisances or invasive are simply doing the same.
Far from an ecologist, Kagan considers his method of thought to be ethical individualism—concerning each individual animal or plant rather than desiring to protect the ecosystem as a whole. “If you go individualistic, which is the way I go, then you have to ask, ‘Do plants count morally, or is it merely animals?’ The victim that you most directly described for the lanternfly is that it’s killing off certain trees. Do trees have moral standing?”
Collectivistic ethics, which places the group before the individual, says that a forest should have legal protection. In 2021, the Ecuadorian government granted the Los Cedros Protected Forest the Rights of Nature, which includes the rights to a healthy environment, water, and environmental consultation. Like the Ecuadorian tropics, Northeastern forest systems provide a multitude of ecological and economic services. Lanternflies disrupt these existing processes—but whether that’s enough to lose their moral status is up to the individual.
However, I agree with Kagan: environmental ethics should be individualistic. I feel satisfied knowing that I am of the same carbon as the fertile soil, or of the same nitrogenous compounds of the billowing kelp. On this colorful, multilayered planet, there are bits that hop, fly, croak, and lie still; there are bits that crash into each other and bits that rebuild the fragments. We are of this artwork, as are the roly-polies, the mice, the scarabs, the squirrels. We organisms are so interconnected, yet, will we ever know how the world looks from the eyes of the spotted lanternfly?
Until we know for sure, I will discontinue my pest-crunching, and transform my “save the trees” goodness into an “every being matters” goodness. The spotted lanternfly can carry on with its life, and I will with mine.
This post was originally published on here
