What would Moses have thought of Brown Marmorated Stink Bugs?

The Brown Marmorated Stink Bug (Halyomorpha halys)

A couple of years ago, I had never heard of this little stinkmeister.  I am the person in the Biology department the community outreach  people contact when someone needs a bug identified.  I remember clearly the first time one of these critters arrived in the mail from a concerned citizen, all nasty and decomposing in a Ziploc baggie (the bug, not the citizen).  I had never seen the species before and had to do a little research to figure out that it was a recently introduced invasive species.

Two years later, I suspect that most of my US readers have heard of Halyomorpha halys (a shield-bug in the family Pentatomidae).  I plucked one off the bedroom ceiling just last week (Brown Marmies have evolved the ability to drive teenage girls screaming from a room). Even I would shriek if I lived in Doug Inkley's house:



Did that, or did that not, give you the heebie-jeebies?

There are lots of unpleasant creepie-crawlies in the world and most of them do not bother me in the least.  The thing that worries me about Brown Marmorated Stink Bugs is Google.

My blog is about animal behavior and as a human animal I do what most Americans do when I want to investigate my environment.  I don't tap my antennae around as the woodlouse does nor do I sniff around the grass like the Jack Russell Terrier.  I go to Google.

To my knowledge we are the only species to evolve Googling, but I believe the dolphins are close on our tail.

Do you know what happens when you type the words "marmorated" and "biblical" into the search field of Google (at least on late Sunday evening, February 20 of the year 2011)?  You find out - in 0.38 seconds - that 15,500 different web pages contain those two words.  15,500!

That is a LOT of people connecting Halyomorpha halys with Old Testament smiting. 

Contrary to what some Televangelists and conservative radio personalities might have us think, I do not believe the Old Testament God is presently looking to smite North America.  So why are these bugs expected to reach plague-level population sizes in the very near future?

Population biologists watch two general things: births and deaths.  Lack of natural predators and lots of crop plants are certainly parts of the equation that lower the death rate.  The other part of the equation may be that these bugs are - even for insects - especially randy.

Back in 1982, when nobody but the bug nerds had heard of Halyomorpha in the US, Hitoshi Kawada and Chikayoshi Kitamura at Kyoto University published a paper about the species which had been "recently noticed as a horticultural pest" in Japan.

Among their findings were that copulation time for mating was approximately 10 minutes - much shorter, the authors claimed, than other pentatomid bugs.  They were also observed to copulate more than five times per day (talk about stamina!).  So much sex might seem like overkill because a single copulation provides a female with fertile eggs for half of her lifespan.  But Kawada and Kitamura found that more copulations extended the period over which a female produced fertile eggs.

Which turns out to be a lot: in her lifetime a female lays more than 450 fertile eggs.

You do the math.  And maybe think about moving to the Red Sea area.  Or invest in a vacuum cleaner with a really big bag.



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