Waiting for Stink Bugs

Those awful brown bugs that stink if you crush them (which you do without realizing it when one crawls on you) will start appearing in your house soon — when it begins to warm up.

The Brown Marmorated Stink Bug invaded the United States in the mid-1990s from Asia. BMSBs not only gross everyone out, they also are wreaking havoc on the country's fruit and vegetable crops.

Scientists have a plan to fight them, and they want your help — but it's going to have to wait until the snow melts and the temps climb back to average around the Hudson Valley.

It's not that the snow is a problem for stink bugs, just for the Citizen Science Project that's going to help eradicate them.

"Snow actually helps their survival," said Peter J. Jentsch, of the Department of Entomology at Cornell University. "As soon as the temps move back into the 60s there will be more BMSB activity in homes. They become active in April with first-generation egg hatch in late May in the mid-Hudson Valley."

Cornell scientists have discovered a tiny wasp that likes to lay its eggs in Brown Marmorated Stink Bug eggs. So university and USDA scientists are collaborating on a project to get you and me and our local schools involved to map all the places in the country where the stink bug shows up — and then loose the wasps on 'em.

"First we need everyone's help to locate the BMSB in the US. We are doing this by creating a National Citizen Science Project," said Jentsch, director of the Hudson Valley Research Laboratory.

It's easy to participate in the project. You find a Brown Marmorated Stink Bug, you snap a photo of it with your phone and send it in.

Guidelines:
Step 1. Join the project by first identifying your insect as a BMSB.
Step 2. Then report your findings on the EDDMaps website. (Early Detection and Distribution of invasive insects)
Step 3. Each day from March 1 to April 31, count all of the adult BMSBs in your home.
Step 4. Enter your data online.

The project will end on April 31, at which time the distribution map of urban BMSB populations will be completed.

How to identify Stinky? He or she will look like this.

How did scientists figure out that the tiny wasp, the size of a pencil tip, would work?

Last summer they put some Brown Marmorated Stink Bug eggs on jalapeno pepper plants on an organic farm in Marlboro, New York. Apparently BMSBs love jalapenos.

The wasp laid its eggs in the BMSB eggs.

"Once we reared the wasp out of these eggs at the Hudson Valley Research Laboratory in Highland, NY, specimens were sent to USDA and to our amazement, confirmed as the Samauri Wasp, Trissolcus japonicus," Jentsch said.

Researchers believe this wasp is the most effective tool for reducing BMSB in the United States, where the stink bug has spread over the past 20 years. If this tiny wasp can be moved to locations where BMSB is a pest, it will significantly reduce home infestations of BMSBs from occurring in the fall, reducing the need to spray the exterior, and in some cases, the home interior, to keep these pests from entering and overwintering in their homes.

More important, it can save fruit and vegetable farmers millions of dollars in management costs and yearly loss of crops.

The wasp's an invasive species too, so scientists will be monitoring it closely, too.

It is now in the wild in Washington and Oregon, West Virginia, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware and New Jersey, Jentsch said. Scientists are also monitoring its presence and looking for its impact on the non-target insects, such as predatory or "good" stink bugs (and there are such things, like the sharp- shouldered stink bug, Podisus).

So the first phase is the mapping project.

The second is to capture, distribute and establish the wasp in agricultural areas, first in New York.

"We will be working with land grant university and USDA entomologists, researchers technical support staff throughout the US to utilize this wasp for one objective, the biological control leading to the demise of the Brown Marmorated Stink Bug in the Hudson Valley and ultimately, the US," Jentsch said.