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by tuxidomasx 2815 days ago
Southern Virginia here. Stinkbugs are EVERYWHERE right now (and have been for the past few years around the end of the summer and into fall).

As I read the headline for this post I saw one slowly meandering up my wall. I also began to think about the possibility of this being done intentionally...

You see, the brown marmorated stinkbugs we have are native to asia. They have no natural predators except for a tiny small wasp that parasticies their eggs (also native to asia).

When I was researching them, I thought "What if China intentionally introduced them to the USA as some sort of ecological attack?" That would be some next-level warfare. Or just a really mean prank.

And then this impending laternfly invasion re-piqued my interest in this theory. It turns out that a similar type of parasitic wasp is the natural predator for laternflys too...

Could this really be a coincidence? Could it be a response to the new tariffs? What if they offer to sell us some bio-engineered wasps (a la Monsanto ) to help control our infestations? But the wasps die after a generation, so we have to constantly buy then...

Of course it could still all be coincidence, but it's fun to think about.

3 comments

Sounds like we just need to import some Chinese wasps to eat all of the stinkbugs, then needlesnakes to eat the wasps, then needlesnake-eating gorillas of course... and in the winter the gorillas will simply freeze to death! Easy.
Accidentally shipping species around is such an inevitable result of global trade that it doesn’t seem very useful to try to hang it on malice.

Also, as the article points out, you can’t just import the pest’s predator because you may find out that predator much prefers your other species to the one you want to eradicate.

Not that I take it seriously, but, following the path of this wild speculation/paranoid thinking: what if the end goal is not to harm the US, but to give the US the problem in order to see what kinds of solutions (if any) US problem solvers invent?