It certainly wasn’t any EPA-approved insecticide.
The Baltimore Sun reports:
The combined fury of Hurricane Irene and Tropical Storm Lee may have drowned much of the region’s stink bug population, but scientists are still hesitant to say that homeowners will see fewer of them when the weather warms.
Scientists say something caused a substantial decline in the number of the bugs last fall before they hunkered down in the region’s attics and closets. Perhaps it was due to natural predators or an unknown parasite. Just as likely, they say, it was the deluge that began just before Labor Day and lasted through September.
“We suspect it was heavy rain because of the regional effect on them,” said Tracy Leskey, research entomologist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. “The population is substantially lower, but we don’t know the reason definitely”…
I recall that many years ago there was a widespread belief that the Passenger Pigeon had gone extinct due to over-hunting. As it turned out this was only a conceit, and the real cause of the demise of the billions of birds (one 1866 sighting was a flock 1 mile wide, 300 miles long, and taking 14 hours to pass a single point – an estimate 3.5 billion birds were in the flock) was most likely a series of years with late freezes in their nesting grounds in the Northern Plains in the 1880s and 1890s.
The passenger pigeon is gone, but the conceit remains.
Yep, nature’s not always kind, especially to species that over populate and destroy the systems that keep them alive!