A stink bug invading Ontario may have hidden out in your attic this winter.
The brown marmorated stink bug is such a huge threat to Ontario’s crops – apples, peaches, grapes, tomatoes and sweet corn just to name a few – that if you see one you are asked to snap a picture of it. Ontario agricultural officials want to track the invasive species’ spread.
“I think this pest over time will show itself to be one of the worst,” provincial entomologist for horticulture Hannah Fraser said.
At risk from this stink bug (called BMSB for short) is $458 million worth of horticultural crops alone in Ontario and more in field crops such as corn and soybeans, said Fraser who works for the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture and Food. BMSB uses at least 170 plants for food or reproduction, is in 40 states and threatens an estimated $21 billion of U.S. crops, according to StopBMSB.org.
“It’s a really bad pest and the reason is it affects so many different crops,” Fraser said Thursday.
It has yet to cause crop damage here but experts say it is only a matter of time. The brown marmorated stink bug is an invasive pest from Japan, Korea, Taiwan and China. They have likely been in the States since the late 1990s. By August 2012 the bugs had established a breeding population in Hamilton. They have been found in 15 spots in Ontario such as Ottawa, Toronto, Niagara-on-the-Lake, London and, as of last year, Windsor.
A brown marmorated stink bug. (Courtesy of Hannah Fraser/Ontario Ministry of Agriculture and Food, and Ministry of Rural Affairs)
They are great hitchhikers who catch rides in cargo and cars and are often found by homeowners first in urban areas as the bugs emerge in the spring. They would be a garden pest to plants such as tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and eggplant and fruit trees. Online lists of plants they favour say you could also expect to see them on ornamental plants such as Rose of Sharon hibiscus, garden snapdragons, magnolia trees and sunflowers to name a few.
So far the stink bugs haven’t been trapped or seen on Essex County farms although some were trapped in the Cedar Springs/Blenheim area last fall, she said. Fraser takes every possible sighting seriously even in areas the bugs have already been detected.
“It really helps us because it’s almost an early warning system.”
As adults and nymphs, the BMSB eats many kinds of trees and plants – their fruit, seed pods, and the stems and leaves – and causes damage such as poking holes in fruit that makes the fruit unmarketable. They have piercing and mouth parts to suck fluid out of plants.
So far it doesn’t look like these stink bugs like being inside greenhouses, she said.
The Western conifer seed bug, which people often mistake for the brown marmorated stink bug. (Courtesy of Hannah Fraser/Ontario Ministry of Agriculture and Food, and Ministry of Rural Affairs)
The kind of broad pesticides that will kill the stink bugs are ones farmers don’t like to use and after spraying, more stink bugs will just move back into the crop, she said. Long-term solutions will have to include other strategies such as luring them out of crops or repelling them, Fraser said. So far they don’t have predators and since they can overwinter in people’s homes, the cold winter didn’t kill them off.
Gardeners can try to shake them off plants into a dish of soapy water to drown the bugs.
She hopes there will be some solutions found in the United States by the time the bugs are damaging crops here. After discovering the pest, it took four to six years for U.S. farmers to see damage, Fraser said. In Ontario the BMSB was first detected in Hamilton in 2010.
“We’ll have to track it and see what happens,” Fraser said. “People really need to be on the lookout for it.”
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