Mother Earth

1.       Asian stink bug wreaking havoc on mid-Atlantic crops

A foul-smelling invader is marching across the U.S., already posing as a major threat to agriculture. The brown marmorated stink bug is believed to have “hitchhiked” with a shipment of goods from Asia and was first spotted in Pennsylvania in 2001. It has since rapidly spread to infest thirty-three states from coast to coast. When threatened, it releases a pungent odor; it is its voracious appetite for almost any edible substance which makes it a major threat to farmers. Last season, mid-Atlantic apple farms lost about eighteen percent if their crops from that bug! Solution: the USDA is pinning its hopes in a wasp that has proven to be an effective predator against the stink bug in China, Japan, and Korea. Since predators that feed on native U.S. stink bugs are going after the new Asian cousin, it may become necessary to breed and release sterilized swarms if the Asian wasps to control crop damage. I don’t know about the Asian wasps, but hope that by incorporating this species into the western’s biosphere populations, the other species within it won’t become greatly affected by it. I say this because sometimes in order to cure something, or to make it better, negative side effects become unintentionally evident and mostly unavoidable along with the cure. Hopefully this theory doesn’t pertain to the initiation of the Asian wasp into the western hemisphere.