Brown marmorated stink bug
Halyomorpha halys
— Where the name comes from
The scientific name is opaque: the -morpha part says the shape, but on the rest there is no agreed explanation. The common name is more instructive, and in Italy it has changed within ten years — first “Asian marmorated bug”, then simply “Asian bug”, and finally, in the fields of the north, just “the bug”: when an alien species becomes common enough, the language strips its adjectives and leaves it the name of the group, as though it had always been there.
— Facts
- Group
- Insects · Insecta
- Order
- True bugs
- Habitat
- Orchards, fields, and in autumn houses
- Range
- Native to China, Japan and Korea; today Europe and North America
- Size
- 12–17 mm
- Diet
- The juices of over three hundred plant species
- Lifespan
- 1 year; the adult overwinters inside buildings
— Characteristics
- 01
It attacks more than three hundred different plants, very rare among bugs.
- 02
In autumn it enters houses in thousands to overwinter.
- 03
Its antennae carry two white rings, which tell it from native species.
— What sets it apart
It reached Europe around 2007 and Italy in 2012, inside a container, and within five years had caused northern fruit growing damage counted in hundreds of millions of euros a year: it pierces the pear or apple while still small, and the fruit grows deformed and woody around the puncture. Against it the release of the samurai wasp has been authorised, a parasitoid two millimetres long that destroys its eggs in its native range — one of the few biological control programmes approved in Italy, decided after years of cage trials to make sure the agent would not attack native bugs.
