Knowledgebase
Carroll Garden Club Invasive Insects display #893326
Asked February 28, 2025, 11:19 AM EST
Carroll County Maryland
Expert Response
Thank you for reaching out to us and for your interest in educating the public about invasive insects.
I would recommend referencing this list of invasive insects from the Maryland Invasive Species Council: https://mdinvasives.org/species-of-concern/insects/.
I would say spotted lanternfly (Lycorma delicatula) and the potential incoming invasive species, box tree moth (Cydalima perspectalis) are key invasive species to teach the public about; box tree moth has not been reported in Maryland yet but it has been reported in Delaware and Pennsylvania. If you want further guidance on what other invasive insect species to include, please let us know.
For information on invasive insect species I would recommend referencing University of Maryland Extension (UME) pages on each species such as our UME Box Tree Moth web page and our UME Spotted Lanternfly in Home Gardens web page, as well as web pages from other Extension institutions. If you are having trouble finding information on a particular species, feel free to reach out to us again. For finding particular web pages, I recommend typing into your online search engine your species of interest followed by "UMD Extension" or "Extension".
In regards to photos, insectimages.org is a great credible source of photos. iNaturalist.org can also be a great source of photos as long as you reference and follow the corresponding photo license for each photo. iNaturalist, under their filtering options, allows you to select particular Creative Commons (CC) photo licenses such as CC-BY-NC. You do not need an iNaturalist account to browse photos, you can just start by typing in the common name or scientific name of a species into the search browser bar on their home page. Here is a web page detailing what each of the different CC licenses mean: https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/cclicenses/. If you have any trouble finding particular photos, please let us know.