What Are Lanternflies Attracted To?

Spotted lanternflies are drawn to a surprisingly layered mix of cues: specific host plants, airborne chemical signals, tall vertical shapes, dark colors, and even the sounds and waste products of other lanternflies already feeding nearby. Their single strongest attraction is to tree of heaven, an invasive tree whose toxic chemistry the insects exploit for their own defense. But the full picture involves plant odors, visual silhouettes, social aggregation signals, and vibrations transmitted through tree bark, all working together to pull these insects toward particular spots in the landscape.

Tree of Heaven and Other Preferred Host Plants

If you could pick one thing spotted lanternflies are most attracted to, it would be tree of heaven (Ailanthus altissima). This fast-growing invasive tree, originally from China, is the insect’s strongly preferred host, especially during the later nymph stages and adulthood.¹ That preference intensifies as they mature. Early-stage nymphs are generalists and will feed on dozens of plant species, but as they grow and develop their distinctive red coloring, they narrow their diet and gravitate heavily toward tree of heaven.²

Grapevines rank as the other major draw. Researchers have directly compared how well lanternflies survive and reproduce on cultivated grapevines versus tree of heaven, and grapevines support full development and breeding.³ This is what makes the pest such a threat to vineyards. Heavy feeding on grapevines disrupts the plant’s sugar and nitrogen balance, and at higher densities the damage becomes severe enough to inhibit the vine’s ability to photosynthesize.⁴ Beyond grapevines and tree of heaven, lanternflies will feed on maples, walnuts, willows, and many other hardwoods, but those two species are what pull them in most reliably.

Why Tree of Heaven Specifically

The lanternfly’s devotion to tree of heaven is not just about nutrition. The tree produces bitter compounds called quassinoids that are toxic to many animals. Rather than being deterred, lanternflies absorb these chemicals and store them in their own tissues, with the highest concentrations ending up in their salivary glands.⁵ The result is that lanternflies fed on tree of heaven become distasteful to birds. In experiments, house wrens ate significantly fewer lanternfly nymphs that had fed on tree of heaven compared to nymphs raised without access to it, and pecked at food containing tree-of-heaven-fed adults less often.⁵

This chemical theft strategy appears to drive the developmental host shift. As nymphs transition into their red-and-black late stages, their diet narrows toward tree of heaven, and their bodies acquire the warning coloration that advertises their toxicity to predators.² The attraction to tree of heaven, then, is not just dietary preference; it is an evolved survival strategy.

Plant Smells That Draw Them In

Lanternflies do not simply stumble onto their favorite plants. Airborne chemicals released by host trees actively pull them in. Researchers identified 43 compounds from host plants that triggered antenna responses in lanternflies, and 11 of those turned out to be genuinely attractive when tested individually.⁶ The best-known attractant before this work was methyl salicylate, a wintergreen-scented compound already used in some traps. But a compound called sulcatone proved even more attractive on its own, and certain blends of plant volatiles outperformed methyl salicylate by a wider margin still.⁶

Understanding these chemical signals is crucial for trap development, but it also explains something homeowners notice: lanternflies do not infest all trees equally, even when multiple potential host species grow in the same yard. The particular volatile cocktail a tree emits determines how strongly it draws the insects. A stressed or damaged plant may emit different ratios of these compounds, potentially changing how attractive it is.

Honeydew and Other Social Chemical Signals

Once a few lanternflies start feeding on a tree, their waste products create a chemical beacon that attracts more. Lanternflies excrete large quantities of honeydew, the sugary liquid that drips from infested trees and coats anything below them. That honeydew is not just a nuisance; it releases volatile compounds that draw in additional lanternflies. In lab tests, honeydew from adult males was significantly attractive to other males.⁷

Several individual chemicals in the honeydew proved attractive on their own. Benzyl acetate and 2-octanone attracted both males and females, while 2-heptanone attracted only males and 2-nonanone attracted only females.⁷ The sex-specific nature of these responses suggests the honeydew functions partly as a social gathering signal, helping the insects congregate for mating.

Separate from honeydew, lanternfly body extracts also act as attractants, but only in combination with honeydew. Field experiments found that males responded to body-extract lures in a dose-dependent way, but only when honeydew was present alongside them. The timing was revealing: the male response kicked in around week six, when mating season started, peaked through weeks seven to nine, and faded as mating wound down. Females, by contrast, responded to the combined signal later in the season, around weeks ten and eleven, when egg-laying replaced mating as their main activity.⁸ This synergy between honeydew and body chemicals means that infestations are self-reinforcing: more lanternflies on a tree generates more honeydew, which pulls in even more lanternflies.

Vibrations Through the Bark

Beyond chemistry, lanternflies are drawn to vibrations transmitted through plant surfaces. In controlled experiments, both fourth-instar nymphs and adults moved toward the direction of an operating speaker that transmitted vibrations through the substrate. When the speaker was on, nymphs clustered at about 10 degrees from the speaker’s direction, and adults averaged about 3 degrees off. When the speaker was silent, movement was essentially random.⁹

This matters because lanternflies sitting on a tree and feeding, moving, or communicating generate vibrations that travel through the bark. When researchers put live-captured lanternflies in mesh bags on trees near traps, allowing their vibrational and chemical signals to travel freely, trap captures of fourth-instar nymphs and adults increased significantly compared to traps near sealed plastic bags where signals were blocked.¹⁰ The signals from captured insects effectively lured additional lanternflies into the trap’s vicinity, amplifying the aggregation effect already driven by chemical cues.

Visual Attraction to Tall Shapes and Dark Colors

Lanternflies do not rely on smell and vibration alone. When dispersing by flight, they respond visually to tall vertical objects. In vineyard studies, a tall pole (about 12.5 meters high) caused many flying lanternflies to change course and land on it. The insects typically reacted when they were an average of about 2 meters away, at an average flight height of roughly 8 meters.¹¹ This reaction range is short, which tells us something useful: lanternflies do not spot a tree from across a field and head straight for it. They appear to be detecting nearby silhouettes against the sky and turning toward them at fairly close range.

Color also plays a role. Trap research found that brown sticky bands caught more lanternflies than other colors, and subsequent trap designs used brown corrugated plastic with peak reflectance in the ultraviolet (around 360 nanometers) and red (around 620 nanometers) ranges.¹² The preference for dark, bark-like colors makes sense given that the insects spend most of their time on tree trunks. If you have ever noticed lanternflies gravitating to dark patio furniture, fence posts, or stone walls, their attraction to dark vertical surfaces is the likely explanation.

Where They Choose to Lay Eggs

Egg-laying females have their own set of preferences that shape where populations take hold. In wooded habitats during early invasion stages, researchers found that the probability of finding an egg mass near a wild grapevine was about 88 percent, dropping to just 9 percent where grapes were absent.¹³ This is striking because it suggests that even though adults strongly prefer tree of heaven for feeding, the presence of wild grapevines in an area is a powerful predictor of where eggs end up.

Females are notoriously indiscriminate about the surface they actually deposit eggs on. Egg masses show up on tree bark, rocks, outdoor furniture, vehicles, shipping containers, and railcar wheels. The actual oviposition surface seems to matter less than the surrounding habitat, which needs to offer the right mix of host plants. So while females are not “attracted” to your car bumper in the way they are attracted to tree of heaven, they will lay eggs on any smooth, hard surface they happen to be resting on if the surrounding area provides the plant resources their offspring will need.

Hitchhiking on Vehicles and Man-Made Surfaces

Lanternflies’ willingness to land on and cling to man-made surfaces has serious consequences for how fast they spread. All mobile life stages can remain attached to the exterior of a vehicle at highway speeds. In wind-tunnel experiments, every life stage stayed attached to vehicle surfaces against wind speeds of about 100 kilometers per hour at least once, and roughly 30 percent of all tested lanternflies stayed put at the maximum wind speed across all positions tested.¹⁴ Sheltered spots on the vehicle, like wiper blades and the area where the windshield meets the hood, provided the best grip, with average dislodgement speeds of about 84 kilometers per hour.¹⁴

This hitchhiking behavior is how lanternfly populations jump to new regions far beyond where the insects could fly on their own. It is not that they are attracted to vehicles per se. Rather, their visual attraction to vertical objects and dark surfaces leads them onto cars and trucks, and once there they can hold on long enough to travel substantial distances. If you park near infested trees, a quick check of your vehicle before driving away is one of the simplest things you can do to avoid moving them to a new area.

How These Attractions Shape Trapping Strategies

Knowing what lanternflies respond to has directly shaped the traps researchers and homeowners use. Circle traps placed on tree trunks exploit the insects’ natural behavior of walking up vertical surfaces. When researchers compared collection designs, traps using removable plastic bags caught about four times as many adults as jar-based designs.¹⁵ These bag traps also outperformed commercial sticky tree bands, especially during the adult stage when lanternflies are largest and most mobile.

One finding that might surprise homeowners: you do not necessarily need a tree of heaven to run effective traps. In multi-state surveys, circle traps placed on maples and black walnuts caught lanternflies at rates comparable to traps on tree of heaven, particularly during the earlier nymph stages.¹⁵ This makes sense given that young nymphs are generalists and will climb many tree species. Even more interesting, traps baited with methyl salicylate did not detect lanternflies at higher rates than unbaited traps, suggesting the chemical lure adds little when the trap already sits on a host tree that lanternflies are walking up anyway.¹⁵

The research into aggregation signals has opened a different approach. Traps that allow captive lanternflies’ chemical and vibrational signals to radiate outward caught significantly more fourth-instar nymphs and adults of both sexes than traps where those signals were sealed off.¹⁰ Using the insects’ own social behavior against them, essentially turning the first few catches into bait for more, may prove more effective than any single chemical lure.

What Probably Does Not Attract Them

Given how often people encounter lanternflies on porches, grills, and white walls, it is worth noting what the research does not support. There is no published evidence that lanternflies are attracted to artificial light the way moths are. They are daytime insects that settle down at night rather than flying toward porch lights. While they often cluster on the sunny sides of buildings, this appears to relate to warmth-seeking and their tendency to rest on large vertical surfaces rather than to any attraction to the light itself.

Food odors from outdoor cooking, sweet beverages, or fruit left on tables also do not appear in the literature as attractants. Lanternflies feed exclusively by piercing plant tissue with needle-like mouthparts and drinking sap. They are not generalist scavengers like yellowjackets or house flies. If they land on your picnic table, it is because the table is a vertical or elevated surface near host plants, not because they are after your lunch.

Standing water, too, is a non-factor. Lanternflies get all the moisture they need from plant sap and are not drawn to puddles, birdbaths, or rain barrels. The sticky honeydew they produce sometimes collects in pools on decks and patios, and that honeydew can attract other insects like wasps and ants, which creates the false impression that the wet surface is drawing in more lanternflies. In reality, the lanternflies are overhead on the tree, and the mess below is a byproduct, not a magnet.

Why Removing Tree of Heaven Is Complicated

A common first instinct when people learn about the tree-of-heaven connection is to cut down every one they can find. This is more complicated than it sounds. Tree of heaven resprouts aggressively from its root system. Cutting one down without treating the stump with herbicide typically produces a thicket of new shoots. And because tree of heaven can also be used as a trap tree, where lanternflies concentrate on a single tree that is then treated with insecticide, some management strategies actually preserve a few trees intentionally to consolidate the pests in one killable location.

Wild grapevines add another layer of complexity. They are common in forest edges throughout the eastern United States, and the strong association between wild grape and egg mass presence means that even areas without tree of heaven can sustain lanternfly populations if grapevines are nearby.¹³ Reducing lanternfly numbers in a landscape often requires managing both tree of heaven and the vine layer underneath the canopy, not just one or the other.