Locusts

Pictured is a mummified Rocky Mountain Locust collected from a glacial deposit

It was on this day. July 20, 1875, that the largest recorded swarm of locusts in American history descended upon the Great Plains. This species of grasshopper maintained its permanent range in the Rocky Mountains, but when its population fluctuated, the Rocky Mountain Locust expanded its range well into the Great Plains. The final swarms peaked from 1873-1877 at the same time that masses of European migrants were flooding the Great Plains in search of gold and silver and the American Dream. They ended up homesteading in places such as Nebraska, Colorado, Iowa, the Dakotas, and Minnesota. This was the Great Plains—open, continuous grasslands, as far as the eye could see.

Laura Ingalls Wilder, who wrote Little House on the Prairie chronicling life on the Great Plains, describes the intensity of locust swarms in her book On the Banks of Plum Creek:

...the grasses were still and the hot air did not stir, but the edge of the cloud came across the sky faster than the wind. The hair stood up on Jack’s neck. All at once he made a frightful sound up at that cloud, a growl and a whine.

Plunk! Something hit Laura’s head and fell to the ground. She looked down and saw the largest grasshopper she had ever seen...

The Cloud was hailing grasshoppers. The cloud was grasshoppers. Their bodies hid the sun and made darkness. Their thin, large wings gleamed and glittered. The rasping whirring of their wings filled the whole air and they hit the ground and the house with the noise of a hailstorm.

These grasshoppers ate everything in sight, even fence posts, leather, dead animals, and sheep wool. One common comment was that “grasshoppers ate everything but the mortgage.” The Rocky Mountain locust is believed to have been the most common macroscopic creature of any kind ever to inhabit the planet.

The swarm in July of 1875 was about 1,800 miles long, 110 miles wide, from Canada down to Texas. People described the locusts as driving snow coming down in winter. They sounded like thunder or a train and covered the ground nearly a foot deep. Trees bent over with the weight of them. Some farmers tried running into them to scare them away and they had their clothes eaten right off their bodies.

The conditions were ideal since there had been a drought since 1873 and the size of the swarms tended to grow when there was less rain. Similar swarms continued until the mid 1880's when the rains had finally returned. Within a few decades, the Rocky Mountain locusts were believed to be extinct. The last two live specimens were collected in 1902, and they're now stored at the Smithsonian.

July 2005 finds locusts swarming in Africa. "Unless control measures are carried out immediately there will be a great deal of destruction of crops," Yimer Assen of FAO Ethiopia, said. "The volume of the locusts is increasing and the problem we face is that they are migrating from one village to another."

Swarms contain millions of locusts that literally eat everything in their path. Each insect can eat its own body weight in food each day.

"They are very destructive in the amount of matter they eat in a day," Peter Odiyo, head of the Desert Locust Control Organisation of East Africa (DLCO), said.

"In a country already facing serious food shortages, that translates into a lot of damage to livestock, grazing areas and food crops in the field. They eat anything green," he added.

Locusts have in the past laid to waste parts of Africa. In 2004, they ruined more than one million hectares of crops in Mauritania. The swarms have spread from Chad through Sudan and into Eritrea and northern Ethiopia.

Locusts have been around for a long time.The Bible talks about how when such locust swarms came, `the land was darkened and ate all the plants in the land so that nothing green was left'. The ancient Egyptians referred to them as an army in the sky.