LA PORTE, Ind. – While cities and landowners have tried everything from vacuums to circle traps to reduce the number of dreaded spotted lanternflies in their area, others are turning to a more innovation solution: dogs.

Kallie Bontrager is the nursery inspector and compliance officer with the Indiana Department of Natural Resources (DNR). Bontrager’s work involves ensuring that plant nurseries in her territory comply with Indiana’s plane health regulations. This role is part of the DNR’s Entomology & Plant Pathology Division, which protects Indiana’s agricultural and natural resources from invasive plant pests. And in this case, the spotted lanternfly.

Bontrager is also a dog mom who trains two dogs (Eric and River) in obedience and agility competitions. And shortly after the lanternflies showed up in northwest Indiana, her bosses at the DNR gave Bontrager the OK to teach her dogs to sniff out spotted lanternfly eggs.

For Bontrager, the process started roughly three years ago and with a lot of learning on the fly. The odor from insects is not perceptible to humans, so she started by making sure her dogs knew how to search for odors, then moved on to the scent of the plant hopper’s egg mass.

The first sightings of the pests in Indiana came in 2021 in Switzerland County and they’ve been slowly spreading to adjacent counties ever since.

“At times there’s too many lanternflies in an area and that results in being too much odor for the dogs to pinpoint,” Bontrager said.

Bontrager said the process involved a lot of trial and error, as well as a lot of help from other people who have trained detection dogs.

In this dilemma involving the dragonflies, Bontrager is assisted by Eric and River. River replaced Que, which was just retired from duty after two years of duty, Bontrager said.

“I’ll bring the dogs up and do some perimeter searching,” Bontrager said. “When they get tired, I’ll put them away and join in with scraping the eggs. Most of the time my dogs will work 15 to 20 minutes and that’s enough for them at one time. Some people ask why I don’t utilize, say, 10 dogs at a time, but then you’d need as many handlers. Some states have dog-handler teams that do this, but not in Indiana.”

This raging battle against this pest goes on in Ohio as well. Cleveland Metroparks has turned to six dogs to help fight lanternflies, in a network of more than 325 miles of trails spanning over 25,000 acres.

Connie Hausman, senior conservation science manager at Cleveland Metroparks, attended a lanternfly research and technology development meeting in 2024. That’s when she learned that dogs can help detect the spotted lanternfly.

“There was a poster that explained how trained dogs were being used to locate and identify spotted lanternfly egg masses,” Hausman said.

Coincidentally, about a month later, Hausman was contacted by some local dog teams that completed training through the Virginia Tech program advertised in the poster. They were looking to continue their dogs’ training and she proposed registering them as a volunteer team.

The park system now has six certified scent detection dogs and their owners assisting. 

It’s about peak season for these hunting dogs, as a spotted lanternfly begins laying eggs in the fall. Once per week, between the end of October through April, the teams search the park system’s priority locations where the lanternfly populations are most concentrated.

“I can tell before he gets directly on an egg mass,” said Paige Malone, owner of Bronco. “His body and demeanor change. He holds his nose as close as possible and freezes his body.”

This is the second season the park system has collaborated with lanternfly detection dogs, and with good results. Last season, Bronco and his team found and destroyed 3,500 egg masses.

“The dogs have helped natural resources staff destroy, over the past two years, 10,000 egg masses, which is up to half a million eggs that would’ve hatched into spotted lanternflies,” said Adam Regula, climate resilient forest manager for the Cleveland Metroparks.

Spotted lanternflies are a native species of China. They were first recorded in Berks County, Pa., in 2014. Since then, they have spread further through the eastern United States.

These insects live by sucking the sap of plants. They have a strong preference for grapevines, maples, black walnut, birch and willow. They lay their eggs on trees, stone, lumber and even cars and trailers. They prefer the Tree of Heaven, but are known to feed on black walnut, maple and grape vines. 

Spotted lanternflies excrete a sugary waste called honeydew. This leads to the proliferation of sooty mold and black-colored fungi. Beekeepers don’t like spotted lanternflies because their bees feed on the honeydew, which he said fouls the taste of honey.

The public has been recruited to try to stop the spread and is encouraged to kill the insect. But before they can be killed, they must first be found. Finding them is like searching for a needle in a haystack. That’s where the dog’s nose comes in.

Populations of the invasive insect are currently found in 18 states.