Brown marmorated stinkbugs are not native to the U.S., but in the years since they arrived, they have spread to 43 states—and have overrun homes, gardens, and farms in one location after another.
In general, it’s often difficult to notice the damage done by stinkbugs, at least at first. Unlike, say, locusts, which simply raze entire fields, stinkbugs wreak their havoc insidiously. The injury they do to corn, for instance, is invisible until the ear is husked, at which point certain kernels—the ones into which a stinkbug stuck its pointy mouth—will reveal themselves to be sunken and brown, like the teeth of a witch.
It is not that the brown marmorated stinkbug can’t survive the winter outdoors. It has, after all, been in existence since long before the advent of human shelters, to say nothing of human beings, and it is perfectly capable of spending the season huddled beneath peeling bark or in the hollow insides of dead trees. But, given sufficient proximity to artificial structures, it will readily spend the cooler months inside instead.
Overwintering stinkbugs also display another characteristic that determines where you are most likely to find them. They are negatively geotropic, meaning that—unlike the roots of plants, which are positively geotropic and extend toward the earth—they tend to move away from the ground. In other words, like millionaires, feudal lords, and goats, stinkbugs exhibit a preference for high places.
A further perversity of stinkbugs in the home is that they are simultaneously extremely easy and extremely difficult to kill. On the one hand, in the face of mortal danger they do not have the sense, or the speed, to flee. On the other hand, dispatching them by any of the traditional methods—smashing, squashing, stepping on—means that, like good Christians, they will triumph even in death, in this case by leaving behind a malevolent olfactory ghost.
Like the stinkbug, the samurai wasp arrived in the United States by accident, and a small number have lived here since at least 2014. Now, though, entomologists hope to breed and release it in sufficient quantities to curtail the stinkbug population.
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