Do you remember the 1999 box-office hit movie “The Matrix” in which mankind’s only hope to win the war against the machines was to use nuclear weaponry to permanently scorch the sky, creating a permanent, massive cloud layer too thick and too dense for adequate sunlight to penetrate, for the robots to be able to draw their solar energy from? Well (spoiler alert), that strategy didn’t work too well and it actually backfired, as the robots learned to quickly adapt, and then enslave the human race to draw upon their body heat for an endless, abundant source of energy to power themselves.
Mankind’s quest to figure out how to kill stink bugs is beginning to follow a similar plot line. Or at least it will, if certain scientists within the federal government have their way. Indeed, if the government is getting involved in solving a problem, then you know it has got to be serious! The stink bug epidemic is something that was brought upon by accident not too long ago, perhaps within the past decade. Initially, it was just a handful of stink bugs brought here from overseas through some shipping crates where they may have gone through customs inspections unnoticed, the first report of their presence here being in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Now fast forward to today, and stink bugs have officially been confirmed as having spread out to over 33 states in the continental United States alone.
What is the big deal about stink bugs? After all, there are thousands of different species of insects present in North America at any given moment. What is so special about them that has got the government funding research projects to investigate and thwart the spread of these bugs? Why is the government spending taxpayer dollars to learn ways how to kill stink bugs? Stink bugs are not known to be harmful to human beings in anyway. They don’t bite. They don’t sting. They don’t suck our blood. They don’t even attack other animals or insects. They are peaceful vegetarians by nature. (Looks can be deceiving. They may look like eerily menacing reptilian bugs, but in reality they are harmless, no matter how annoying they may be.) The threat that stink bugs pose to our way of life is purely economic: Stink bugs, in large numbers, are known to destroy farms.
Yes, stink bugs pose a major threat to the agricultural industry. Stink bugs eat all kinds of fruits and vegetables. And they do so by piercing the skin of the food and then sucking the juices out while injecting it with their saliva. So if swarms of stink bugs were to do this on entire farms, it goes without saying that entire crops can be destroyed in this manner. Even in their native domicile of southeast Asia, where stink bugs originate from, they pose a significant threat to agricultural crops there as well. Damage to the agricultural industry has the potential to result in a loss of millions of dollars per year, if the situation is left unchecked.
So what exactly is the government doing to thwart the spread of stink bugs? They are looking at the problem from all angles. They are researching everything from the use of pesticides to seeking to gain an understanding of whether or not stink bugs have any natural predators who pose a threat to them. They are not only looking into how to kill stink bugs but also into how to simply keep the stink bug population under control.
Scientists have not been able to find any evidence that stink bugs are under attack from any other animals or insects in North America. However, by doing a study of these bugs in the context of their natural habitat, in the Far East, they have managed to develop a clearer picture of where they fall in the natural hierarchy of the “food chain”.
As it turns out, bats are confirmed as being avid, hearty eaters of stink bugs. According to one study, a brown bat can eat as many as one thousand brown marmorated (marmorated means having a marble, or streaked appearance, according to the dictionary ) stink bugs within a single hour! How is that for population control? How does this sound: You set up traps for stink bugs – cages filled with bats, that also contain fruit, light and heat (the three things that stink bugs are attracted to) as bait. So when the stink bug is lured toward the cage, the bats are there to eat them up. No need to call an exterminator! No messy stink bug corpses to clean up. No stink. And best of all: free food for bats! Nature will take care of how to kill stink bugs on our behalf, without any intervention from us humans.
Of course this is highly impractical! How many people does the government think are going to be willing to keep bats as pets in our back yards, to keep the stink bugs away? If you think stink bugs are scary looking enough, you haven’t really gotten a good look at bats! Bats, as portrayed in “Batman”, are cute little birds. But if you have ever seen a real bat, then you know that they look like giant, oversized, flying rats!
And then there are other studies that have been done, that reveal that stink bugs do in fact have another predator, which happens to also be in the insect kingdom: wasps. However, the interest that wasps have towards stink bugs is not between the wasp and the living stink bug. Rather, wasps are interested in eating the eggs laid by stink bugs! Yes, wasps pose a threat to the stink bug population at large, by consuming their unborn eggs, but do not pose a threat to the living stink bug population.
Therefore, the introduction of wasps into the environment wherein stink bugs can be found would only be beneficial in terms of population control of the latter. Does this mean that the government might actually be exploring the possibility of introducing wasps into environments where stink bugs are in proximity, as a means of population control?
This sounds good in theory, doesn’t it? We want to keep the stink bug population under control, so therefore we sic wasps on them. But then what happens when the stink bugs are gone? Will we have inherited a new problem? An overpopulation of wasps in our environment. That would seem to be the ironic, “catch 22” of the situation, wouldn’t? Trading our stink bug problem for a wasp problem?
It almost seems as though the mere idea of introducing wasps into our environment would be somewhat akin to the “scorched earth” policy, where in order to destroy the stink bug population, we make the environment worse – not only for them, but also for us humans too!
Not exactly the type of scenario would ever hope to have to play out. But if some scientists have their way, then we might actually be seeing the controlled release of wasps into our environment as a means to quell the explosive growth of the stink bug population in North America. While their aim may be to figure out the best and most efficient way how to kill stink bugs, they may actually be exchanging one problem for another.