I am inundated with Stink Bugs. These pestilential nasties are an invasive species from Japan. They look like dime sized alien life forms. If you crush them they make a horrible cracking sound and the smell they emit upon crushing is the very definition of dank. To kill without crushing them you have to carefully grab them in tissue and flush them down the toilet. They are slow and stupid. All they do is fly around very awkwardly and haphazardly seeking heat sources and breed at an alarming rate. They thrive here as they have no natural predators (yet). I have a south facing wall in my house and when the sun comes out, they cover the outside. That's bad enough, but at peak times I'll kill as many as 20 that have somehow wandered inside over the course of the day. I hate them. I want to end their species.
Chemical warfare can help and I have called in pest control services for that. I've also taken to sealing up any cracks in window casing or other structures like the fireplace where they might be sneaking in. Still, it seems like an eternal battle.
There are some minor rays of hope. One is that it seems local predators (birds, larger bugs) are very slowly adapting to eat these things. More promising is the arrival of a new invasive species from Japan, Samurai Wasps. These heroic little critters are the native predator of stink bugs in Japan and so it only makes sense they should follow the stink bug invasion with one of their own. Not to be confused with murder hornets, samurai wasps are so small as to be barely visible. They do pretty much nothing else but hijack stink bug eggs to grow more wasps. God bless them.
Long term, it's hoped that the samurais will bring the stink bugs under control, to the point they aren't a nuisance. I should note it's not just having these nasty things in your house that's the problem. They can devastate crops. So our little samurai buddies have real economic value.
You know, I post occasionally about what I call the "Roaring 20s 2.0" and the astonishing technological and scientific advances that will pay off in the coming years, yet here we are in the 2020s still fighting plagues and pestilence.
