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Hey everybody, it's Maryl

We begin today's show with an ode to a fashion superstar who first stepped on the scene here in America back in

2014 and these days, I mean they're everywhere

My goodness, they just give you this deep high-fashion look to them two yellow stripes on the sides of their body

There's a big burst of red in the middle

There's some white going down the sides that almost kind of look like eyes when their wings are extended

It is just

Incredible. They are stunning. They are refined. They are the moment. They are

A spotted lantern fly. Yeah, a bug there. They're a bug and that commentator was Sammy Ramsey

He's a professor of entomology at the University of Colorado Boulder. These spotted lantern flies are some of the most

Gorgeous insects you will ever see and that's one of the reasons why it's so sad that they are indeed

invasive species and invasive species is a creature that shows up in a region of the world that it's not native to and competes with us for

Resources or in some way causes harm to humans or the environment

Now luckily the spotted lantern fly doesn't bite or sting or attack us humans

But it can damage crops and trees and leave sticky stuff everywhere. We'll get to that and it has spread to 14 states

The situation is bad enough that the US Department of Agriculture has been telling people to kill them on site

Now if you've ever tried to stop on one of these gorgeous agents of chaos

You will know that they are jumpers and trying to get rid of them one by one is they playing whack-a-mole

So on today's episode I talked to Sammy about why the lantern flies do sadly have to go and how we can keep them under control beyond just

...