In my last post, I addressed some common questions that farmers ask about climate change. Although I considered why the scientific information documenting climate change is trustworthy, I didn’t actually explain how climate change works. A savvy reader picked up on this and was dissatisfied that I didn’t present the relationship between increasing CO2 and global warming. In this post, I’ll correct that omission.
The CO2-temperature connection occurs through the “Greenhouse Effect”, a process that almost everyone has heard about but surprisingly few people can explain.
Summary: Learn how University of Maryland researchers and University of Maryland Extension (UME) Master Gardeners collaborate on research to reduce brown marmorated stink bug populations in Maryland. Project Stink-be-Gone, by Rebeccah Waterworth
As temperatures cool, many of you probably have had to share your homes with bugs. One of the most notorious of these squatters is brown marmorated stink bug (BMSB) (Fig. 1). It is also a serious pest of many economically important crops. Paula Shrewsbury and I are interested in developing sustainable pest management practices for BMSB, particularly biological control using small wasps (Fig. 2). These critters are also known as parasitoids, and they lay their own eggs inside a stink bug egg. The baby wasp (larva) inside the stink bug egg eats the developing stink bug. After about 10 days, the wasp larvae have become adults, chew their way out of the bug eggs, and fly off to look for new bug eggs to parasitize! Stink bugs do not hatch from the eggs where wasps emerged (see the video at the end of this post).
Fig. 1 An adult brown marmorated stink bug, Halyomorpha halys. Photo by David R. Lance, USDA APHIS PPQ from bugwood.org.