I smell a skunk...or maybe it's a stinkbug. I have been hearing reports, for two years now, of a new Asian pest in Georgia that seems to be both a blessing and a curse. The stinkbug, dubbed the bean platispid, eats kudzu. Kudzu of course, is that vine of Biblical proportion that covers forests, billboards and even parked cars in the south. Kudzu was described in the book “Deliverance” as a "vegetable form of cancer." This bug apparently devours kudzu. On the surface a good thing right?

Well, Midwestern farmers should be quaking in their Carharts because the bug also seems to fancy soybeans. And worse yet for us, it behaves much like the Asian ladybug beetle and covers houses in the fall. Plus, it is twice the size of those ladybugs, exudes a very foul- smelling substance and stains everything orange. Then there’s its strange quirk of fastening itself to white cars, leaving orange stains on the paint job and taking joyrides to other states. Like ours? It won't be long folks; you heard it here first.
 
My concern is over the head-scratching mystery of the bug's arrival on our shores. I remember reading several years ago how a pest had been introduced that was showing some promise in controlling the vine. I remember thinking at the time that this seemed as fast and loose as Soil Conservation Service’s introduction of kudzu itself back in the 1930's.

It was brought here from Japan, en masse, to control erosion. Didn't anyone wonder then just what might happen when you introduce a nitrogen-fixing legume that puts Jack's beanstalk to shame, into poor, depleted soils in which natives were already struggling? Sounds like a no-fail recipe for a rampant weed to me.

Somehow, any early reports of this newly introduced kudzu-eating pest have disappeared and the entomologists of Athens, Georgia are all feigning ignorance as to just how this bug just happened to be found in Athens. “Where did it come from? How did it get here? I didn't bring it. Did you bring it?” No one seems to know.
 
Now, anyone who knows anything about Athens, Georgia knows that, apart from being mentioned in a Tammy Wynette/George Jones duet, this northwestern Georgia town is to botany and entomology what the Silicon Valley is to technology. I find it a little suspicious that this kudzu-eating bug just happened to blow in on a hurricane (an actual theory) and land its ugly, stinky little self right in the nation's lap of kudzu, botany and entomology. The conspiracy theorist in me, well-honed by decades of finding that many conspiracy theories are well-founded, thinks that the Athens intelligentsia are experiencing a bit of amnesia over the bug's, shall we say, travel arrangements.
 
How many times do we need to introduce a living organism, for what seems like a reasonable purpose at the time, only to find a monster lurking in the near future? Starlings, house sparrows, pigeons, fire ants, kudzu, crown vetch, the Asian carp, water hyacinth, melaleuca trees, and the gypsy moth were all brought here to solve a problem or create commerce. Yeah. The way I have it figured, I have about five years before the new bean platyspid starts buzzing and clicking around my light fixtures. Plenty of time to sell the house and move away from the nearby soybean field. In the meantime, I hope whoever brought the bug to Athens Georgia is having fun washing his siding and vacuuming up stinky, leaky bugs. And I hope he or she drives a white car.

— Deb Terrill