Dr. Morrison believes we can use what is referred to as the ‘Attract-and-Kill’ strategy (http://www.stopbmsb.org/managing-bmsb/attract-and-kill/), in which BMSB attractants are used to lure them to a location of a person’s choosing, in order to target pesticide applications to dispose of them. He is currently testing variants of this technique to determine which type of traps and which amounts of insecticide generate the most efficient BMSB mortality levels. He has shown that the attractants keep the bugs within a very small area of arrestment even with low concentrations of the stimuli (about 2.5 meters). Additionally, these attractants can arrest the insects for at least a day. This provides growers with time to react to their presence and time for the stink bug to ingest a lethal dose of insecticide. Therefore, you can achieve a high kill rate throughout the season while minimizing damage on adjacent trees. In an analogous situation, trap cropping is being investigated in organic vegetable farms as a means for retaining the stink bugs outside of the crop, and results show there is some potential for adapting this strategy to a wide range of systems.

Dr. Morrison’s work with the USDA on reducing pesticide usage (while providing growers with easy-to-use alternatives) is a great example of Integrated Pest Management (IPM) at work. We need as many tools in the IPM toolkit as possible to combat a pest, allowing us to reduce our reliance on pesticides.
Khrimian, Ashot, Aijun Zhang, Donald C. Weber, Hsiao-Yung Ho, Jeffrey R. Aldrich, Karl E. Vermillion, Maxime A. Siegler, Shyam Shirali, Filadelfo Guzman, and Tracy C. Leskey. "Discovery of the Aggregation Pheromone of the Brown Marmorated Stink Bug (Halyomorpha Halys) through the Creation of Stereoisomeric Libraries of 1-Bisabolen-3-ols." Journal of Natural Products 77.7 (2014): 1708-717. http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/np5003753.
Lee D-H, Cullum JP, Anderson JL, Daugherty JL, Beckett LM, Leskey TC. “Characterization of Overwintering Sites of the Invasive Brown Marmorated Stink Bug in Natural Landscapes Using Human Surveyors and Detector Canines.” PLoS ONE (2014) 9(4): e91575. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0091575
Weber DC, Leskey TC, Walsh GC, Khrimian A. “Synergy of aggregation pheromone with methyl (E,E,Z) -2,4,6-decatrienoate in attraction of Halyomorpha halys (Hemiptera: Pentatomidae).” J Econ Entomol.(2014);107(3):1061-8.
Wallner AM, Hamilton GC, Nielsen AL, Hahn N, Green EJ, Rodriguez-Saona CR. “Landscape Factors Facilitating the Invasive Dynamics and Distribution of the Brown Marmorated Stink Bug, Halyomorpha halys (Hemiptera: Pentatomidae), after Arrival in the United States.” PLoS ONE (2014) 9(5): e95691. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0095691
Chris Taylor is a PhD student with focal areas in IPM and insect-microbe symbioses. He studies the brown marmorated stink bug (BMSB), and the focus of his research is on understanding the relationship between BMSB and its gut symbionts to determine whether exploiting this relationship is feasible in management programs