Bye Bye Stinky

Image via WikipediaBring On the Stink Bugs

Have stink bugs met their noxious match?
That’s the claim of a group of Japanese researchers who announced last week that they had developed the first-ever stink bug repellent, made from a common plant fungus.
The repellent could promise relief for homeowners and farmers plagued by the invasive bugs, which arrived in the United States from Asia in the late 1990s and have become a highly damaging pest to farmers and a major annoyance to homeowners. They release a noxious, skunk-like odor when crushed or disturbed, and harm crops by boring holes in everything from apples to soybeans.
As our colleague Ken Maguire reported in September, these invasive stink bugs (as opposed to domestic varieties) have no natural predators here and are particularly rampant in mid-Atlantic states like Maryland, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Farmers there are using conventional insecticides to control the bugs, but are experiencing limited success, he wrote.
Last week, however, a group of researchers led by Hiromitsu Nakajima, an agricultural chemist at Tottori University in Japan, declared that they had found a powerful natural repellent to the bugs. The repellent is derived from a fungus that infects green foxtail plants, a common weed found in Japan and the United States. An extract of the fungus strongly repelled stink bugs in laboratory tests, and could be capable of repelling up to 90 percent of stink bugs in other settings, the researchers wrote.

Interested but what other things result from this "fungus?" Until all possible impacts are explored - I'm willing to lose a few plants.