I wanted to say Insect Kingdom (as I felt that ‘popped’ a little better) but apparently insects fall under the Animalia Kingdom, which goes to show that I didn’t pay enough attention in biology class. That’s pretty bad, considering that during the year I went to college, my goal (and therefore the focus of my major) was to become a biology teacher.
From a purely biological standpoint, I guess being a stinkbug makes quite a bit of sense. If every time you bit into a particular type of food source, it filled your mouth with pervasively sour/bitter oil that lasted for hours and made you think of unhappiness, you wouldn’t eat that food source unless you absolutely had to. I would eat my own fingermeats straight off the bone before I’d eat a stinkbug.
According to the Wikipedia article, “The odor from the stinkbug is due to trans-2-decenal and trans-2-Octenal.” Hah! Obviously! I mean, you’d have to be some kind of idiot not to know that the trans-2-decenal and trans-2-Octenal… uh… stuff… is what causes that smell.
“The stinkbug's ability to emit a vile odor through holes in its abdomen is a defense mechanism meant to prevent it from being eaten by birds and lizards. However, simply jostling the bug, cornering it, scaring or injuring it, or attempting to remove it from one's house can ‘set it off’. Squashing it is a surefire way of expelling its noxious odor.”
Do not jostle the stinkbug! Do not corner the stinkbug! Whatever you do, do not startle the stinkbug! Do not do these things, because its automatic reaction to any stressful situation is to effectively shit itself. I know it’s not literally shitting itself, but imagine that you jumped out to scare somebody, and their immediate reflex would be to gush forth with the vilest smelling fluid possible, and stink up everything within a 30 foot radius? If that doesn’t qualify as “shitting oneself” in the literal sense, it certainly does in the figurative sense.
“The brown marmorated stink bug is more likely to invade homes in the fall than others in the family. The brown marmorated stink bug survives the winter as an adult by entering houses and structures when fall evenings start to turn cold. Adults can live for several years[citation needed] and look for buildings to overwinter in that shield them from the elements. They will work their way under siding, into soffits, around window and door frames, under roof shingles and into any crawl space or attic vent which has openings big enough to fit through. Once inside the house they will go into a state of hibernation where they wait for winter to pass, but often the warmth inside the house causes them to become active, especially in winter months, and they will fly clumsily around light fixtures.”
The brown marmorated stinkbug can walk through walls. The brown marmorated stinkbug can shape shift to pass through the most unlikely of passageways. The brown marmorated stinkbug is unique on this planet in that it possesses the ability to randomly teleport into warm human dwellings, or any other place where it is highly unwelcome. Once there, in lays eggs in the motherfucking billions and haunts you forever afterward by randomly falling from the ceiling or running into windows and walls and landing on your desk, onto your keyboard, into your drink, or on – if you happen to be sleeping - your face. The article uses the word “clumsily”, which I feel is a bit of an understatement. I am clumsy. If you throw a set of keys at me, there’s a good chance I will fail to catch them. If there are people looking that I for some reason wish to impress, this is an utter certainty. If they are attractive and female, there is a solid probability that my having missed them will cause something to break, or someone to get injured – usually me.
But as clumsy as I may be, my sole means of locomotion does not consist of moving resolutely toward the nearest wall, slamming into it, falling down, and then hanging out wherever I happened to land as though that had been my goal in the first place. Stinkbugs have to be the most graceless, awkward things in the universe. Sure, a moth would head butt a light fixture until the fucking Rapture if its lifespan allowed it to do so, but somehow it manages to do so with grace; given the serious head trauma it must surely be inflicting upon itself, I’d say that’s fairly impressive. Flies can see a millisecond into the future and dodge just about any attack you can launch upon them, except that for some reason, they seem to have a weakness to plastic grids the size of a piece of sandwich bread attached to a bent coat hanger. Maybe they think it is a sandwich, I don’t know. But stinkbugs will happily ram into whatever happens to be in front of them. It’s not often that I feel embarrassed for another species, but stinkbugs are a special case.
I love the scholarly way in which Wikipedia passionately details the methods employed in stinkbug murder:
“There are many methods for removing the stink bug from a house without causing it to release its odor. The quickest way is to allow it to walk onto something like a newspaper and then simply take it outside, although the bug may simply find its way back inside again, and they can live for years. Another option is to gently collect it using a piece of tissue and flush it. An electric flyswatter quickly stuns them and kills them after a few seconds without squashing them, but it can still cause them to emit the foul smell, although not as often as a normal squashing. Dropping them into a jar with an inch of soapy water with a high enough concentration will dissolve the exoskeleton, and once enough are collected they can then be flushed down the toilet on occasion. A hand-held device called the BugZooka will capture live bugs by way of a sucking force, without killing them, and thus won't cause a stink. Vacuum cleaners have also been used, although this can stink up the vacuum cleaner.”
Basically, you can be as gentle and pacifistic as a Buddhist monk, or you can dissolve the poor things alive like a goddamn Batman villain, but there’s very little you can do to avoid stinking up
your environment aside from either ignoring them or investing in specialized technology. Talk about a survival strategy. Here is an insect so fundamentally loathsome that one’s immediate instinct is to kill it on sight, but which is so unpleasant to kill that one will actually avoid doing so because of the smell involved. I had thought these creatures were practically free of predation, but of course, in the insect/arachnid world, there is always something grosser:
“Several species of the Parasitoid wasp have been found to attack stink bugs. Spiders and Praying mantises are also known to feed on stink bugs.”
All this proves to me is that wasps, spiders and praying mantises are freaky as fuck, and I would never accept a dinner invitation from one, even if it was hand printed on really expensive paper. Besides, I wouldn’t know what to bring as a gift. A bunch of fly carcasses, I guess.
