Late this afternoon, along Piney Woods Church Road, I met up with a beautiful bug with a dreadful name. It is the Rough Stink Bug (Brochymena quadripustulata). Another insect ID book on my shelf uses the Latin to assign it the common name of Four-blistered Bronchymena, which I suppose is a little better, though it is quite a mouthful and carries the unpleasant image of blisters. (The Rough Stink Bug, as you can see in the photograph below, has a number of raised orange-red spots, including four on its upper thorax which are responsible for its Latin species name.) I came across this creature resting on the trunk of a pin cherry tree. According to one field guide, it dines on the sap of many trees, including cherry, though it occasionally feeds instead on larvae and pupae of other insects. The other field guide claims instead that it feeds only on “the juices of caterpillars and other soft insects”. Predatory or no, if I were a caterpillar I would err on the safe side and stay well away from the Rough Stink Bug.
