Here's one invasive species that's never going to end up on an invasivore menu: the brown marmorated stink bug. (This is actually the most appetizing photo I could find.) They smell when you squish them, they get all up in your house, and they ruined $37 million worth of fruit crops last year. And they're likely to make an even bigger mess this year as they migrate into warmer climates.
The stink bugs, which are native to Asia, have no natural predators in the U.S., so they were bad enough when they first showed up in eastern Pennsylvania over a decade ago. But they've been gradually moving south, and warm climates make stink bug populations explode. A stink bug incursion into Florida, says one researcher, could be "like the atomic bomb going off."
Entomologists are considering introducing Asian wasps to kill the stink bugs, but then what's going to kill the wasps? Any time you bring in an invasive species to get rid of an invasive species, you have the potential for an old-woman-who-swallowed-the-fly situation. But it beats unregistered pesticides. And maybe the wasps are tastier, at least?
