Spotted lanternflies about to hatch: How to get rid of them
DAYTON, Ohio (WDTN) — An invasive species is set to return to Ohio in the coming days, threatening crops in the state.
The spotted lanternfly was first reported in the United States in 2014 in Pennsylvania, and has since traveled westward, making it to the Buckeye state by 2020. This invasive species come from Asia, where it is a native species.
Invasive, damaging spotted lanternfly getting ready to emerge. Kill them.
One of their many food sources includes grapes — a $6.6 billion dollar industry in the state. As eggs are set to hatch in the coming days, the spotted lanternfly's presence in Ohio could endanger profits.
'They insert a stylet into the flume system, the vascular system of the tree, and they basically drink sap,' said Dr. Don Cipollini, Wright State University biology professor.
Cipollini says by drinking that sap, lanternflies can harm trees by robbing the plants of their nutrients.
'If you have a large infestation on a relatively small tree, say a grapevine or a small sapling of a maple or an ornamental tree in your backyard, they can really do a number, and more or less drain the plant of all the carbohydrates it's trying to acquire through photosynthesis,' said Cipollini.
The Ohio Department of Agriculture cannot eradicate the species, so they have been educating farmers, including winemakers, on how to prevent infestations with insecticides.
'It is susceptible to some chemical treatment,' said Jonathan Shields, Ohio Department of Agriculture agriculture inspector manager. 'A lot of the growers already have treatment regimes that they undertake each year just as part of their regular practices and they can be pretty effective at knocking down spotted lanternfly populations.'
Officials want you to destroy these mud-like masses 'before they hatch'
'They're just these brown dirt-like masses that suddenly appear on a tree or a wall or a fence that you just have no explanation for otherwise,' said Cipollini. 'If you sort of scrape that away, you can see that there are eggs in there. And if you do see that, that's exactly what you should do. You should scrape them off, smash them.'
The Miami Valley is not located in a quarantine zone for the insect, and the ODA encourages you to report any sightings to them.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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Politico
28-05-2025
- Politico
‘He Is Ohio': DeWine Pitches an Alternative to Ramaswamy
CINCINNATI — The caper was great on paper. Elon Musk, growing tired of Vivek Ramaswamy and eager to push him out of the Department of Government Efficiency, telephoned Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine earlier this year with a request: appoint Ramaswamy to the Senate seat being vacated by Vice President-elect J.D. Vance. Initially, according to a person familiar with the call, Musk urged DeWine to send Ramaswamy to the Senate so the former presidential hopeful could be the DOGE point-person in Congress. But shortly into the call, Musk betrayed his actual motivation: He said he found Ramaswamy annoying. DeWine wasn't about to solve Musk's problem for him by handing Ramaswamy what could amount to a lifetime appointment to the Senate. But the GOP governor knew that if he passed over Ramaswamy for the Senate, the hyper-ambitious biotech entrepreneur would simply turn to running for governor. And if that were to happen one of two things would transpire, neither of which would delight DeWine as he heads to his golden years: He'd be succeeded by Ramaswamy or his old Democratic rival, Sherrod Brown, who is now eyeing the governorship. Which is how the term-limited governor hatched what would be his last full measure of devotion to the state he's served in elected office for much of a half-century. First, DeWine appointed his lieutenant governor, Jon Husted, to fill Vance's Senate seat. That created a vacancy for lieutenant governor. And who, pray tell, would be perhaps the only Ohio Republican who could step into the state's number-two job, catch Trump's eye for celebrity and then stop Ramaswamy from claiming the gubernatorial nomination next year? A former Ohio State football coach. Enter Jim Tressel. Not that DeWine pitched his plot to Tressel so directly, which might have scared off the football coach-turned-Youngstown State president. But the bespectacled, 78-year-old governor, who's shrewder than his image as Ohio's grandpa or 'Governor Sleepy Tea' suggests, was quick to have the coach keep his options open. 'I said to him, 'OK, I'll think about this, but I'm going to make sure everyone knows that I'm just here to help, this is it,'' Tressel recalled to me earlier this month about the first conversation he had with DeWine about the appointment. 'He says, 'Oh, no, you can't do that.' I said, 'Why is that?' And he said, 'Because you don't know if you'll like it — what if you tell everyone on day one you're just here pinch-hitting and you fall in love with this?'' Three-and-half months after he was sworn in, Tressel is very much enjoying the job — and still isn't ruling out running for governor. Yet time in the Trump era waits for no man. Not even Buckeye greats who've brought national titles back to Columbus. Since Tressel became lieutenant governor, Ramaswamy has entered the race for governor, won Trump's endorsement and, over DeWine's urging to hold off, earned the formal support of the Ohio Republican Party. The primary is still nearly a year away, but the race may be over before it even begins. For starters, Tressel may not even run. He's 72 and, good Ohioan that he is, has a winter place near Ft. Myers. Two years in state government could be his own final measure of devotion to OH-IO. DeWine acknowledged to me what he terms the 'conventional wisdom' about the race, but argued that Tressel presents a unique profile. 'He told me he thinks he's been to every high school in the state,' the governor said of the former coach, who played at Baldwin-Wallace, in Berea, and also did coaching stints at three other state schools. 'He is Ohio, he really understands the diversity of this state.' Continuing, DeWine said, 'Once you get beyond the introductions, then he's got to obviously sell. I think he will.' When I spoke to Tressel later in the day, before he addressed a Cincinnati Republican banquet, I reminded him that the jockey can't want it more than the horse. He agreed. So does he have the fire for a campaign of his own? 'Do I have the fire?' he said, repeating the question. 'You know, I probably got the fire to do anything I'd like to do, and — do I want to light the fire? I don't have any lack of fire. But do I want to strike the match?' Yet Tressel's challenge was evident from the moment he walked into the ballroom for the party dinner and saw the program: The Hamilton County GOP's dinner is now called the Lincoln-Reagan-Trump Dinner. Few states better illustrate the transition of the Republican Party to the Trump Party than Ohio. The Ohio GOP was once the picture of the establishment, electing George Voinovich and Bob Taft as governor, figures such as DeWine and Rob Portman to the Senate and a host of long-serving House leaders and chairs who could swing a gavel and a wedge. Then came the earthquake of 2016. The first signs of change were clear in the state's presidential primary. A sitting governor, John Kasich, prevailed, but Trump carried every county along the working-class, eastern spine of the state, from Lake Erie all the way down the Ohio River. DeWine was savvy enough to avoid tangling with Trump and remained on friendly if not close terms with him. The president stayed out of both of DeWine's primaries, in 2018 and four years later. Yet, Trump has effectively crowned the last two Senate nominees, blessing Vance's 2022 bid and that of Sen. Bernie Moreno last year. Vance defeated Portman's preferred pick and Moreno toppled DeWine's candidate last year, carrying every Ohio county in the primary. Watching all this was Ramaswamy. He grew up in Ohio but has never run for office there until now and had little civic connection to the state. Yet he recognized that the way to enter GOP politics today isn't necessarily to join the local Rotary Club and then take a look at the next opening for state rep. It can be easier to do what he did: make money, get on Fox News for attacking the left and then run a longshot presidential campaign complimenting rather than criticizing Trump. All politics is national, tribal and defined by support or opposition to Trump. Vance, another Ohioan who made his name outside state politics, offered an obvious model. Others, too, were demonstrating how one could take the big, beautiful Trump elevator to the top rather than climbing the greasy pole. There was Ron DeSantis in 2018, a junior House member who got Trump's attention by praising him on Fox and rode the president's endorsement to the governorship over the establishment favorite. Four years later, Sarah Huckabee Sanders harnessed her role as Trump's press secretary and own time on Fox to sidestep a pair of statewide officials to become Arkansas's governor. DeSantis, though, had at least been elected to Congress, and Sanders was the daughter of an Arkansas governor. Why, then, is every ambitious Ohio Republican who had been waiting since 2018 for DeWine to finally call it a career stepping aside for somebody whose only political history was trolling presidential debate stages and then being nudged from DOGE before Trump was even inaugurated? I took that question to Frank LaRose, precisely the sort of Republican pol you'd expect to covet the governorship. An Ohio State graduate, Green Beret and state senator, LaRose was elected Secretary of State the year DeWine was first elected governor. Yet LaRose is running for auditor, not governor. 'I think that Vivek Ramaswamy is a rare generational talent,' LaRose told me. Fine, but about all the others deferring to Ramaswamy: Is Trump's endorsement and Fox News celebrity the long and short of it? 'So there's reality, right?' LaRose said, getting to the point. 'Some people may not be looking to begin a suicide mission.' There's also speculation here that LaRose is rallying early to Ramaswamy due to another, more time-tested political standby: in hopes he'll be tapped as lieutenant governor. LaRose said he could play grizzled sergeant major in Columbus to the novice, newly commissioned governor. 'Folks like me that know how state government works can help him take his big ideas and implement them and actually get them done,' he said. (LaRose adds, for the record, of being named lieutenant governor: 'If he decides that he wants to talk to me about that then I'm open to that conversation, but I'm running for auditor.') In Ohio, the governing body of the state GOP can endorse candidates ahead of primaries, offering them resources and infrastructure. DeWine, recognizing he had to slow the freight train, telephoned some state committee members urging them to hold off, and Tressel put out an 11th-hour statement the night before the vote earlier this month. 'I have not ruled out a run for Governor,' he said. It was too late. Ramaswamy had Donald Trump Jr. urge Ohio Republicans to make the endorsement and Lara Trump, the president's daughter-in-law, called in at the outset of the meeting to urge the committee to unite behind Ramaswamy. Ohio Republicans voted overwhelmingly to make an endorsement and then, by an even wider margin, voted to endorse Ramaswamy. 'That was very significant on top of what else he already had,' Curt Steiner, a longtime GOP strategist, told me about Ramaswamy. A few weeks later, Attorney General David Yost, the only other major Republican who was challenging Ramaswamy, dropped out of the race. A 'steep climb,' Yost said, had become a 'vertical cliff.' In Cincinnati, Tressel was just starting out on the trail. He had been spending evenings for much of the spring dashing from the state capital to make the rounds of the county GOP dinner circuit. The old coach was testing the waters and I wanted to see him in action. The most striking part of watching Tressel was seeing how humble and candid he was about his learning curve in politics. And that's even allowing that some of the aw-shucks routine may be for show, the Ohio household name with the Hall of Fame ring demonstrating his lack of entitlement. When do you have to decide? I asked. 'I don't even know what the timing things are,' Tressel said. 'I don't even know what you have to do to sign up to run for something.' You know who does, I told him: Mike DeWine. 'Well, and that's why if I thought there was a timing problem right now I would hear about it from him,' said Tressel. State government and politics, he had concluded, have their 'seasons, just like what I used to do.' But it was hard to miss the sense of wonder from Tressel, about the range of work, the responsibilities and the people — especially the governor himself. Reverting back to his assistant coach days, the lieutenant governor spent much of his dinner speech extolling the policy-oriented DeWine and, well, sounding a lot like him. Tressel said the word 'workforce' more than 'Trump' (which was easy, actually, because the only time Tressel invoked the president in his remarks was when he recited the name of the dinner). Tressel also got a kick out of learning a new phrase: 'LG.' He hadn't previously heard that shorthand for lieutenant governor, he told the crowd, joking that it sounded 'like a light.' (LEED, get it.) Tressel, DeWine told me, 'truly is an outsider.' I'd put it a different way. Jim Tressel is a Mike DeWine guy in a Donald Trump party. Who else shows up at a party dinner and, far from delivering red meat, skips the protein altogether? Tressel opened his remarks by demonstrating an astonishing recall for the talents, careers and families of his former players, a group of whom was sitting in the back of the room, and then detailed the industries historically associated with Ohio's big cities before getting to the heart of his speech. It was a play on the letters G-O-P. Tressel talked about gratitude, opportunity and perspective. The only sign he had on his wall as coach, Tressel said, was a plea from Albert Einstein: 'Concern for man himself and his fate must always constitute the chief objective of all technological endeavors.' Needless to say there were no denunciations of the woke left, let alone any disparaging nicknames for the opposition. There also weren't many applause lines. Speaking to attendees before and after the banquet, I found uniform respect — and many a fond memory — for the old coach. Most, though, said a primary that isn't until next spring was all but decided. Part of that is because one of the dinner's namesakes had already laid hands. It's also, though, because Ramaswamy has built his own mini celebrity following. 'Back in February, I thought well, Tressel may get in, there may be a fight,' said Andrew King, a candidate for Ohio Supreme Court. 'But I've been to 45 different Lincoln Dinners all over the state, and every time Vivek is there, the room is packed, there are receiving lines and he's signing books.' Steiner, the strategist, said it bluntly: 'It would take Vivek making some cataclysmic mistakes now.' Which, if his conduct as a presidential candidate and controversial Twitter takes offer any precedent, isn't totally out of the realm. Yet former Rep. Steve Stivers probably got it right when he said that Tressel's hole has all but vanished. 'He'd have to run like Archie Griffin to have any shot now,' said Stivers. The hope among the old guard is that Trump could be tempted into one of his dual endorsements should Tressel enter the race. But that seems unlikely if Ramaswamy maintains his massive polling advantage, Trump's frequent barometer for endorsements. Nobody may be rooting for Ramaswamy harder than DeWine's old nemesis and fellow Ohio political warhorse. Sherrod Brown, 72, was first elected to office here in 1974 and DeWine two years after that. Brown ousted DeWine from the Senate in 2006, but lost his own re-election bid by three-and-and-half points last year, pulled under by Trump's double-digit win here and the state's changing political demography. Brown has told people close to him that he has another campaign left in him and, if he runs, it will be for governor, not the Senate. DeWine, it seems, may not be the only 70-something Ohioan with one final caper up his sleeve.
Yahoo
21-05-2025
- Yahoo
NWS and NOAA cuts impacting staffing, forecasts, research
DAYTON, Ohio (WDTN) – NOAA has been under the gun in 2025, with employees taking buyout options and probationary employees let go. In a draft leaked to our partners at The Hill, NOAA can expect to be cut by 27 percent in 2026, and eliminate all funding for weather, climate and ocean laboratories, cooperative institutes, regional climate data and climate research. 'Cutting out these infrastructural pieces, we're essentially pulling the rug out from underneath our entire capacity to really understand what the atmosphere is doing and to make any kind of progress,' said Dr. Jana Houser, Ohio State University associate professor of meteorology and atmospheric sciences. 'And not only that, we're actually setting ourselves up to go backwards because we have to cut observations, and observations are the fuel to what drive our forecast models.' Houser says this cut to funding will be felt by every part of weather forecasting. 'This is really ultimately catastrophic to our entire infrastructure for everything atmospheric science related, from climate change to your everyday weather forecasts that you get when you turn on whatever your favorite app is, to flood monitoring, flood prediction to ocean monitoring, etc.,' said Houser. Those cuts wouldn't just impact the future of weather research, but also the quality of forecast that goes out. 'These research agencies are the ones that are doing the ground work to make numerical modeling better, to improve our scientific understanding of the way the Earth atmosphere system works,' said Houser. The National Weather Service office located in Jackson, Kentucky has not been fully operational for over a week, and these closures could continue to grow as a hiring freeze is in place. This will lead to other offices picking up the slack, potentially leading to more missed severe storms. 'The fallout is that you have dropped warnings. You have people warning the wrong storms. You have miscommunication and misunderstanding between what's happening on the ground and what's happening in the forecast office. You have spotter reports coming in and you don't have enough people to figure out like, is that report for Storm X or Storm Y?' said Houser. According to NBC News, the NWS Wilmington office, who forecasts for the Miami Valley, has been without their boss since the Meteorologist in Charge announced his retirement on LinkedIn in February. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
16-05-2025
- Yahoo
How movies like ‘The Final Reckoning' accurately depict DoD assets
DAYTON, Ohio (WDTN) — Have you ever wondered how some of your favorite movies nail their depictions of U.S. Military personnel and other governmental agencies? Well, a big support to filmmakers is the entertainment liaison office for a corresponding agency. Lt Col Gina 'Flash' McKeen, director of the United States Air Force and United States Space Force Entertainment Liaison, says that the process is one that allows productions to get the details right by consulting Department of Defense (DoD) assets. 'So our role in the entertainment liaison office, and it's the same for all branches of the service, in the Air Force One, which is where I work, we help connect any entertainment media project to official assets that are that are belonging to the DoD,' said McKeen. 'So essentially, if you have an Air Force story or a Space Force story, a production company would reach out and request support,' McKeen explains. That support could be a script consultation to clarify terminology and ensure it's being used correctly or more extensive, like orchestrating a time for the production to be at a base to record official Air Force assets. Speaking specifically about the USAF and USSF Entertainment Liaison Office specifically, McKeen says that 'Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning' is one such movie to reach out for help. 'They were able to film Air Force aircraft doing their actual mission,' said McKeen. 'So, you'll see that in the film. We also got to bring in advisors, actual special operators to the film set, to be special military experts for the actors so that they could get everything right.' Those individuals made checks on terminology used in the film, advised how one would act in the given scenario (no spoilers), how their uniform would look, how their equipment would be worn, etc. Nolan's 'The Odyssey' shot entirely on IMAX film cameras 'So it's really mutually beneficial. They get production value, credibility, realism, and we get authentic depictions of our military,' McKeen said. Before a film production crew can get consultation from an entertainment liaison (related to DoD assets), the specific office will consider the following: Reliability and credibility with financing and distribution. Depiction of the DoD asset (Ex: a military member does something wrong, there must be an equal level of accountability depicted as well). After this review process, the liaison office will work with the production to take advantage of real base operations. 'So say they wanted to get footage of an F-35 flying and they needed to have it flying in front of mountains. They could tell us that, and then we could say, 'well, there's going to be F-35 missions happening in this location around this time. These are planned training flights. Would you like to come record those?' And if that works out for them, then we do all the extra stuff to give them access,' said McKeen. This includes drafting a production assistance agreement with the production, which is a correspondence on what will be provided by the DoD on behalf of the production. This service has been offered in some capacity since the late 1940s, although things have evolved over the years. The USAF and USSF Entertainment Liaison Office has been in operation as it is now for 30 to 40 years. For more information about the USAF and USSF Entertainment Liaison Office, click here. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
