![]() A murder campaign is in effect, the citizenry stirred up. ![]() The authorities already want the newcomers gone. One hypothesized they might like to warm themselves on the glass another that they preferred massing on smooth surfaces.) (Why do they flock to office buildings? Researchers aren’t sure. 23 before I got to the end of the building, most smashed and smeared on the concrete, a tie-dyed lanternfly killing field. Out for a walk recently, I had started counting at the entrance to a downtown office tower and reached No. Now they’re everywhere underfoot - among us, around us, on us, with us. You have to wonder if they are, if they can really be, serious. But they are also slow-moving, weak-flying, crowd-tending - a plague of doofuses. ![]() Spotted (nearly leopard print) as the name suggests but not, in fact, a fly, the spotted lanternfly has two sets of wings, its under-set brilliant red, a cape like something André Leon Talley might have worn - finery to be displayed at moments of danger to warn or to intimidate. Just two years ago, the bugs arrived in the big city, overdressed and a little dumb. You roll your eyes, tap a foot to clear a path - nothing. Like novices, out-of-towners, they go slowly, clogging the pavement. They are new(ish) New Yorkers, your flighty, frustrating neighbors. If you’ve spent any time at ground level, you know the type. My passenger, all one inch of him, was a Lycorma delicatula, a spotted lanternfly. He (I think “he,” though I didn’t turn him over to check for the female’s telltale red valvifers at the distal end of the abdomen) froze when he sensed I saw him, playing dead. In the humid wedge of a revolving door, a guest had pushed in with me. ![]()
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