UPenn Training Dogs To Sniff Out Spotted Lanternfly Egg Masses

PHILADELPHIA — University of Pennsylvania's School of Veterinary Medicine is working on a pilot program that tasks dogs with sniffing out egg masses of the dreaded spotted lanternfly.

Penn Vet is working on training scent detection dogs to identify Spotted Lanternfly egg masses. In doing so, researches hope to proactively neutralize the invasive and destructive insects before they become a fully realized threat as a mature adult.

Cynthia Otto, DVM, PhD, professor of Working Dog Sciences and Sports Medicine and director of Penn Vet’s Working Dog Center is leading the effort to harnesses dogs’ powerful noses to hunt down the masses so that can be destroyed.

Each fall, spotted lanternfly adults lay egg masses, each containing up to 50 eggs.

The egg masses are hard to identify and find.

Otto and her team began the first phase of training dogs to detect spotted lanternfly eggs in December 2019. Eggs were initially presented to the dogs in a lab, either scraped off tree bark or on a piece of bark removed from a tree.

Next, the dogs were tasked with identifying live eggs on cars, pallets, hidden under things, and in other realistic environments.

The research team found great results.

Penn Vet researchers are looking to the next group of trainees which includes Lucky, an 18 month old German Shepherd whose future job as the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture’s first Spotted Lanternfly scent detection dog will be instrumental in safeguarding the state against evolving threats posed by the species.