NEW ORLEANS — The pea-sized bugs look a bit like ticks, can suck one-fifth of the yield out of a soybean field and travel by highway.
In the 5½ years since they were first spotted in Georgia, kudzu bugs have spread 400 to 500 miles west and north — as far as Louisiana, Arkansas, Washington, D.C., and its suburbs, and southern Delaware.
“We don’t know any way to stop it,” said Blake Layton, a Mississippi State University entomologist.
Ultimately, cold winters and lack of kudzu probably will decide how far kudzu bugs spread, said Wayne Gardner, an entomology professor at the University of Georgia.
They’ve spread far and fast by hitching rides. They’re attracted to light colors, especially white. If a white truck, RV or car stops near a soybean field or kudzu patch, it is likely to carry at least a few, which will alight at any stop near their favored plants or wisteria, another Asian import.
It only takes one. Every kudzu bug in the country carries the genes of a single female that apparently traveled from Asia by air. The first sighting wasn’t far from Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport.
Gardner said last year’s cold winter and spring have slowed the spread.
About 30 counties reported their first infestations last year — about one-quarter the number that did so in 2013, according to a map of the insect’s spread since the summer of 2009. Last year’s new locations included 15 Mississippi counties and nine in Louisiana, with Virginia, Florida, Arkansas, Alabama and Kentucky each reporting one or two.
So far this winter, Gardner said, there hasn’t been enough prolonged cold to slow them again.
Although eradication may be impossible, kudzu bugs can be controlled, entomologists say. They’ve done less damage than stinkbugs to Louisiana’s soybeans and can be killed by the same pesticides, said Sebe Brown, an assistant area agent for the Louisiana State University AgCenter.
As with ladybugs, any that get indoors should be vacuumed up.
