Stink Bugs No Longer Invincible

The first one broke in on August 29. Throughout September, every warm, sunny day brought more. Wiggling though cracks a fraction of their size, smearing windows, crawling up walls, hibernating in curtains, under cushions, behind pictures and among magazines. As humans and dogs basked outdoors on the last Saturday in September, a persistent hailstorm of invasive brown marmorated stink bugs pinged house, windows and doors.
    Nothing stops them but the suction of a vacuum cleaner or Bugzooka. So armed, we’ll catch hundreds. But many more will live among us until they swarm again to leave in spring.
    “Few treatments deter Halyomorpha halys, the damage it causes or its ability to spread,” say investigators at the Institute for Genome Sciences at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.
    “Growers consider the invasive stink bug to be the single most important pest in the mid-Atlantic region, and they have tried desperate measures, including the increasing use of broad-spectrum pesticides to control the problem.”
    They’re so pesky that Dr. Francis Gouin, the Bay Gardener, cut down his peach orchard rather than war with stink bugs over the fruit.
    Those bugs are pretty smart, but humans ought to be smarter.
    So University of Maryland geneticists and entomologists have devised a new strategy to quickly sequence the bugs’ genes. Their findings, they say, “could lead to new ways to control this abundant and costly pest.”
    The Maryland scientists developed a way to skip the time-consuming first step of breeding genetically identical individual animals in the laboratory. Instead, they managed to sequence and analyze all of the genetic variants that arose in their population of stink bugs, and to do so at all points in the insects’ life cycles, from the egg stage through late adulthood.
    “This is the first step in our ongoing work to develop a pest control strategy that employs molecular genetic techniques to manage the stink bug invasion without affecting other, potentially beneficial insects,”
says Prof. Leslie Pick, chair of the University of Maryland Entomology Department, who guided the research.