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Wednesday, March 07, 2018

When 26,000 stinkbugs invade your home

Brown marmorated stinkbug
(Photo by bugguide.net)
A few years back in October, Pam Stone went upstairs in her cabin just outside Landrum, South Carolina, to close the french doors that led from her bedroom to the deck. When she got to her bedroom, the walls were "crawling with insects—not dozens of them but hundreds upon hundreds. Stone knew what they were, because she’d seen a few around the house earlier that year and eventually posted a picture of one on Facebook and asked what it was. That’s a stinkbug, a chorus of people had told her—specifically, a brown marmorated stinkbug. Huh, Stone had thought at the time. Never heard of them. Now they were covering every visible surface of her bedroom," Kathryn Schulz writes for The New Yorker.

Stone's hair-raising example isn't unique or even extreme, Schulz writes: stinkbugs are an invasive species that has spread across 43 of the 48 contiguous U.S. states since it arrived. Brown marmorated stinkbugs are a particular nuisance, destroying crops as well as invading homes. Schulz's piece is a long one, but well-worth the read.


Read more here.

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