Going Buggy

From the Department of "This Will Not End Well..."

Pennsylvania is pretty much ground zero for a certain alien invasion. No, I don't mean Mexicans. This is actually worse.

It's the brown marmorated stink bug.

I don't know if you're unlucky enough to have met these little buggers (heh. buggers.), but they give new meaning to the word "pest". Not only are they everywhere, but it takes special effort to get rid of them.

You can't just squish them like a normal bug. If you kill them, they give off a gawd-awful stench -- hence the name, right? You can't even suck them up with the sweeper... their little corpses will make the entire machine reek. You're reduced to a half-assed catch and release system.

So not only do I feel like a hippy, escorting some creepy-crawly out of the house when he more properly belongs on the bottom of my shoe, I do it knowing the smelly little bastard will probably have crawled through an invisible crack and back into the house by the time I close the door. He'll probably beat me back to the living room.

So why am I not overjoyed that the scientific community has decided to solve the pest problem?

Because I see where this is going.

See, the big brains at the USDA think they can curtail the stink bug population by introducing a new insect to the ecosystem. They're experimenting with teeny little Asian wasps that lay their eggs inside stink bug eggs, thus effectively aborting stink bugs in unold numbers.



What could go wrong? Right?

Hooboy. The mind boggles.

First, we need to give serious consideration to the wasps themselves. They're native to Asia. We haven't had a whole lot of good luck with imported Asian species. Whatever we bring in just kinda takes over the environment. Like kudzu. Or how about those asian carp? Remember snake heads? Godzilla?!

Or how about the damn stink bugs in the first place. Yeah.

But more importantly, if we do bring in the wasps to kill off the stink bugs... where does it end?

Remember the old lady who swallowed the fly? Huh?

First the fly. I don't know why. Then the spider. Then the bird. The cat. The dog. A goat. A cow. Finally, the horse, of course.

And how did that work out?

One dead old lady. A whole bunch of freaked-the-hell-out animals. And all for a fly who only had a 24 hour life span in the first place.

So if we follow this stink bug/wasp thing to its logical conclusion, what do we have?

Poisonous lizards? Tasmanian devils? Dingos?
ALLIGATORS?!

See what I'm saying?

I'd rather take my chances with DDT.

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I found this interesting...

I'd forgotten all the animals in the old lady song, so had to do a search. I found the lyrics on a National Institutes of Health website.

What the...?