It looks rather harmless at first glance. With a speckled exterior and a shieldlike shape, the brown marmorated stink bug doesn’t appear to be different from any other six-legged insect that might pop up in your garden. But this particular bug, which arrived in the U.S. from Asia in the mid-1990s and smells like old socks when it is squashed, is a real nuisance.
Not only can it invade homes by the thousands in the wintertime, it’s one formidable agricultural pest, eating millions of dollars of peaches, apples and other crops since 2010.
Scientists are now investigating a new tactic in the war on the stink bugs: the possibility of relying on one of the bug’s natural enemies, the samurai wasp.
Also native to Asia, this parasitic wasp keeps the stink bug population in check there. How? By colonizing its rivals' eggs.
A female wasp will lay its own egg inside of a stink bug’s egg. About two weeks later, an adult samurai wasp will emerge. Between 60 to 90 percent of stink bug eggs in Asia are destroyed this way.