Key points
- A vessel carrying just over 3,700 Electric Vehicles had multiple detections, including the Yellow Spotted Stink Bug which poses a significant threat to Australia's environment.
- A biosecurity breach through unwanted pests or disease could have devastating effects on Australia's agriculture industries. The vessel has left Australian territory on its own accord to manage the biosecurity risk associated with the goods.
- We are working with the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry and partners to drive biosecurity innovation in key priority areas identified in the National Biosecurity Strategy to protect Australia from pests, weeds and diseases.
Still waiting on that electric vehicle (EV) Santa promised to deliver by Christmas?
A shipment of just over 3,700 EVs has had a setback, with the discovery of yellow-spotted stink bugs on board. An outbreak in stink bugs could decimate Australia's agriculture industry for generations, with early detection and prevention being a vital component in Australia's biosecurity strategy.
How stink bugs (and other biosecurity risk materials) are causing delivery delays
A vessel carrying just over 3,700 EVs had multiple detections, including the yellow-spotted stink bug. The vessel has left Australian territory on its own accord to manage the biosecurity risk associated with the cargo. Materials such as soil, plant debris, seeds and live insects are likely suspects of biosecurity breaches when importing cars, with potentially devastating effects if left undetected. September through April are particularly stinky months for highly invasive species such as the brown marmorated stink bug, with seasonal measures in place to ensure outbreaks like this are identified before reaching our shores.
According to our friends at the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry (DAFF), since 2021, Australia’s ports have seen an 88 per cent increase in new vehicles arriving with biosecurity risk material contamination. Over the same period, there has been a 17 per cent increase in the total number of new vehicle imports into Australia. These factors have combined to create one great big cleaning job for the commercial companies employed by car manufacturers to ensure your new car doesn’t come with any ‘hidden extras’!
What's all the fuss?
The Australian government is committed to strengthening Australia's biosecurity and it's a shared responsibility, so we need everyone to be on board! For example, how much damage could one tiny bug do, you ask? Great question.
The answer is A LOT!
Stink bugs can breed huge populations that become both a household nuisance, as well as a major problem for crop growers.
The worst of the bunch is believed to be the infamous brown marmorated stink bug, aka the BMSB. If BMSB established in Australia, it would be extremely difficult and expensive to manage. Unlike our native stink bugs, it has no specialised natural enemies here to keep its population in check. The samurai wasp, Trissolcus mitsukurii, is a potential biocontrol agent that has been found here previously, however it hasn’t been spotted recently. BMSB isn’t easily controlled with pesticides either and feeds on more than 300 types of plant, so could spread rapidly.
We’re on the stinky case
We’re working with DAFF and partners to ensure Australia's biosecurity system remains fit to meet the challenges of the next decade.
The developing initiative is called Catalysing Australia’s Biosecurity and that’s what we’re planning to do – work with our partners to catalyse innovation and ensure our biosecurity system remains world-leading.
An example of the types of projects we are undertaking with DAFF is an app designed to help the biosecurity officers tasked with the tricky job of correctly identifying a stink bug.
There’s an app for that
The BMSB looks like many other stink bug species, making it difficult to recognise. And there are a lot of other stink bug species!
Australia has about 600 named native stink bug species as well as several thousand more undescribed species – none of which pose a biosecurity risk. On top of this, biosecurity inspectors may only have part of an insect to work with, making correct identification even harder.
Correctly identifying whether a specimen is or isn’t a BMSB is really important. An incorrect identification could lead to a BMSB entering Australia with devastating impacts. Conversely, a false positive could result in an expensive and time-consuming biosecurity response to a harmless native stink bug.
To help ensure correct identification, we called on our botanist Dr Alexander Schmidt-Lebuhn. He used artificial intelligence (AI) to build a prototype of an easy-to-use stink bug identification app.
"We took detailed digital images of the thousands of specimens of expertly identified species of Australian and exotic stink bugs we have in our Australian National Insect Collection," Alexander said.
"We then trained AI models to recognise BMSB and tell it apart from similar looking species, especially native ones that are commonly found by biosecurity officers."
After testing the prototype app at ports and airports around Australia, DAFF in collaboration with The Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water (DCCEEW) are adopting the concept and further developing it to be integrated into their data infrastructure.
"We’re now working on a new AI model that can identify priority weed seeds, which can be equally difficult to correctly identify," Alexander said.
Through projects like this, we’re working to deliver implementable science and technology innovations that will ensure Australia’s biosecurity system is ready to meet future challenges.