Let’s start with stinkbugs. On August
24, 2003, a fortnight after the temperature in London had climbed above 100 degrees Fahrenheit for the first time in recorded history, D. E. Maggs of Kingswood Avenue, Queens Park, walked into the British Natural History Museum carrying a small glass jar. It contained two specimens of a curious insect she had collected on her tomato plants. She presented them to beetle curator Max Barclay, who identified them as Nezara viridula, the southern green stinkbug. He noted that they were nymphs, meaning they had been born in
London. “I thought she was having me on,” Barclay recalls. Stinkbugs are widespread in warmer climes, he explained to Maggs, and had long been known to cross the Channel in crates of Italian produce. But until now they couldn’t reproduce in the tepid English summers. Apparently that changed: Barclay says a new generation of stinkbugs has popped ...
