Fig 1.
Photograph of 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th instar spotted lanternfly nymphs.
Double-headed arrow shows the definition of body length, L. (scale bar = 10 mm).
Table 1.
Body length (mm) of spotted lanternfly nymphs from this study and earlier work.
N = number of specimens (not reported in [15]).
Fig 2.
Clustering of spotted lanternfly nymph mass vs length data.
Body mass vs length (filled circles) for (A) 2021 and (B) 2022 data; cluster centroids are shown as black x markers and red lines indicate scaling law fits to all data. Shaded ellipses show the 95% CI for each cluster based on the Mahalanobis distance; note that the shaded ellipses for some clusters are covered by datapoints. (C) Symbols and horizontal lines show the means and ranges of lengths, respectively, for each instar reported in previous studies (Table 1).
Fig 3.
Comparison of body length and mass for each spotted lanternfly nymph stage from this study and previous research.
(A) Spotted lanternfly nymph body length vs instar from this study and previous work (Table 1). (B) Spotted lanternfly nymph body mass vs instar from this study. Error bars are 95% CI for this study and the measures of variance given in Table 1. (Lines between datapoints show overall trends).
Fig 4.
Results from Dyar’s Rule analysis of data from this study and previous research.
(A) Plots of spotted lanternfly nymph log(body length) plotted vs estimated instar number as a test of Dyar’s rule. Markers show data from this study and three previous papers, while lines indicate linear fits. (B) Growth ratios, G, from the fits in (A); dashed line indicates the mean value for 2022 from this study. All error bars are 95% CI.
Fig 5.
Plots and fits showing how spotted lanternfly foot and mouthpart data relate to body size measures.
A) Plots of data and fit results for the dependence on log body length for (A) the log tarsal claw tip-to-tip width, TCT, (B) arolium area, Aadh, (C) labium length, LL, and (D) stylet length, LS. Footpart and mouthpart morphometric data are from [14], while nymph body length and mass are from this study and adult mass and length from [27]. (Fit lines and 95% confidence intervals from ordinary linear regression fits to power laws, as described in the main text).