The Urban Pantheist

Little brown jobs--naturalist talk for smallish, dull-colored, hard to identify organisms--often have no common name. The fact that this one has even the lackluster name of "brown stink bug," means that it has some reason to draw attention to itself. That reason is economic damage. This unassuming insect combines a broad appetite with an impressive reproductive capacity. The result is that Euschistus servus* is known to people who make money from growing food plants, because it ruins them. Besides "catfacing" peaches and putting spots on pecans, brown stink bugs also "may damage soybean, corn, cotton, alfalfa, sorghum, ... and tobacco." This one was probably helping itself to our raspberries. I fed it to the chickens.

* "Euschistus"= New Latin, from Greek euschistos easy to split, from eu- + schistos split, divided. I assume this is a taxonomy joke, about the reassignment of the genus and splitting of species, but that's just a guess. "Servus" literally means "At your service!" but has the sense of "slave."