BMSB Damage Gallery

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Notes

Brown marmorated stink bugs feed by inserting their stylets into the fruit, pods, buds, leaves, and stems of plants. Their injury can manifest itself in different ways.

  • In peppers and tomatoes, feeding on the fruit will produce characteristic white or yellow scars on the skin where the feeding stylets were inserted, or sunken in areas from the internal fruit tissue collapsing below.
  • In corn, the feeding stylets of BMSB nymphs and adults are inserted through the husk and pierce the tender kernels, which may cause them to become aborted, collapsed or discolored.
  • Feeding injury to beans may result in scarred, faded out sunken areas, as well as deformed pods, which also occurs in okra.
  • In blueberry, the sugar levels are lower in BMSB-damaged fruit (Wiman et al. 2015).
  • In hazelnut, blanks are found predominantly early, and corky tissue is found later in the growing season (Hedstrom et al. 2014).