A Virginia Tech study is showing us that you can actually train your dog to be able to identify spotted lanternfly egg masses.
The study, from Virginia Tech’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, pitted dogs trained by their owners against experienced human searchers in a hunt for the 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 a more than 2:1 margin.
“What this means is that we can turn to everyday dogs and their owners and train them as a flexible early detection force,” said Erica Feuerbacher, the study’s lead researcher and professor in the School of Animal Sciences.
“In places where the spotted lanternfly hasn’t reached yet, teams could train in advance and be ready to detect it before it becomes a major infestation,” Feuerbacher said.
The spotted lanternfly, originally from Asia, was first discovered in the U.S. in Berks County, Pa., in 2014.
The spotted lanternfly, which feeds on more than 100 plant species including apples, stone fruits, hops and ornamental plants, and are particularly destructive for wine grapes, has spread to 19 states,
Finding the insect’s eggs early is one of the best ways to slow its spread, but they are difficult to spot, and professional detection dog teams are in short supply.
To test whether dogs and their owners could help fill that gap, Feuerbacher and co-author Sally Dickinson partnered with Virginia Tech grape disease pathologist Mizuho Nita and Texas Tech researchers.
Their 2025 study showed that trained pets could reliably detect spotted lanternfly egg masses in controlled settings.
This time, the team asked: Could the dogs do it in the real world?
“It’s one thing to show dogs can do this in training exercises,” Dickinson said. “It’s another to put them out in the environment, where there are lots of other odors and distractions, and see that they can still perform.”
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Chris Graham
