Could your dog help fight the spotted lanternfly? A new study makes the case

Ordinary pet dogs outperformed trained human searchers in the first real-world test of community dog-handler teams, finding more than twice as many egg masses.

Source: Virginia Tech

by Marya Barlow

At a Maryland vineyard, Debi Persing guided her Boston terrier, Xephyr, slowly down a row of grapevines.

Vineyard workers and scientists had already identified several invasive spotted lanternfly egg masses hidden among the vines. They believed they had found them all.

Then Xephyr stopped at a vine they had marked clear. The little dog sat and pawed at the plant insistently.

When researchers checked more closely, they found the egg masses Xephyr had detected but trained experts missed.

“She was adamant,” Persing said. “She’s a machine at finding odor.”

At a heavily vegetated site, dogs found an average of three egg-mass locations each, compared with 1.3 for each human searcher. Image credit - Photo courtesy of Debi Persing.

Xephyr's search was part of a new study from Virginia Tech's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences that pitted ordinary pets, trained by their owners, against experienced human searchers in a hunt for spotted lanternfly egg masses. It was the first test of community dog-handler teams in real-world conditions, where egg masses occur naturally, scents compete, and target locations are unknown.

The dogs outperformed the people by more than 2 to 1 in densely vegetated areas.

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https://news.vt.edu/articles/2026/06/cals-spotted-lanternfly-dogs-vs-humans.html