Tag: manhattan

Hell’s Kitchen is bugging out over spotted lanternflies.

Residents have formed a lethal strike force armed with a killer concoction of Dawn dish soap, water and vegetable oil to eradicate the six-legged invaders.

“They are either gonna get sprayed or stepped on,” vowed Gigi Stoll, a 60-year-old shutterbug and the badass leader of the “SLF Slaughter Squad,” a six-member crew which will hit the streets Wednesday morning for the first time and “kill as much as possible,” she said.

From then on, they’ll head out two or three times a week armed with the soapy concoction — which she said is kryptonite to the critters, killing them on contact.

Lori Grabowski, a TV and film script supervisor whose credits include “Black Panther” and, ironically, “Spider-Man: Homecoming,” plans to come strapped with a “squirt bottle of death sauce” and go “out on a killing spree.”

“Gigi made me realize that we don’t have to take this lying down,” Grabowski said.

The dreaded insect, which are not dangerous to pets or people, arrived in the Big Apple in July 2020 and is a “significant threat” to agriculture. The pest is native to China and Southeast Asia, bears black spots and gray wings, and dines on up to 100 plant species.

“It’s kind of hard for me not to notice it when it’s in my building, on the walls. It was like a plague,” Stoll said of the invasion.

“It felt really strange to see so many of these things everywhere,” she added.

When the critters returned in full force this summer, Stoll, a Texas native, had enough, and put out a clarion call to her neighbors, who have groused online about the insects, which, like the homeless and drug-addled are “all over the sidewalks” — not to mention the “walls and inside of the buildings from the 40s from 11th Avenue to 12th Avenue.”

“They absolutely take over and swarm people. They are pretty bugs. But they are killing everything we care about — trees, the potted plants on my terrace,” said Jane Berliner, 62, a member of the SLF Slaughter Squad.

“Even the construction workers are stomping them on the streets,” she added.

Last week, Stoll and a sidekick made a dry run, patrolling the West 40s to the Javits Center. They left a “carnage of dead SLFs,” she boasted.

She hopes other neighborhoods follow suit and form their own kill squads.

“People and cars stopped us on the street [this week] and asked us how to make the mix and what to do because they were all suffering the same issue,” the terminatrix said.

She suggested wearing light-colored clothing, to make it easier to spot the winged pests when they land on you.

And make sure to wear high-top sneakers or solid-sole shoes — the better to crush the sap-suckers, she noted.

Stoll continued: “I consider myself a citizen naturalist. We have so much beautiful flora and fauna and we have something causing so much destruction. This is about community and coming together.”