1874 farm family fights a losing battle with the relentless "hoppers" in a cartoon by 19th-century illustrator Henry Worrall.
(Kansas State Historical Society)
Late one July morning in 1874, 12-year-old farm girl Lillie Marcks watched the sunlight dim and a peculiar darkness sweep over the Kansas sky. A whirring, rasping sound followed, and there appeared, as she later recalled, “a moving gray-green screen between the sun and earth.” Then something dropped from the cloud like hail, hitting her family’s house, trees and picket fence. A child in Jefferson County, Kansas, who had gone out at midday to draw water from the well exclaimed: “They’re here! The sky is full of ’em. The whole yard is crawling with the nasty things.” A settler in Edwards County,
Kansas, reported: “I
What are locusts?
Locusts have been feared and revered throughout history. Related to grasshoppers, these insects form enormous swarms that spread across regions, devouring crops and leaving serious agricultural damage in their wake.
Behavior and life cycle
Locusts look like ordinary grasshoppers—most notably, they both have big hind legs that help them hop or jump. They sometimes share the solitary lifestyle of a grasshopper, too. However, locust behavior can be something else entirely.
caused to crops by sporadic swarming events. Desert Locusts can eat their own weight of food per day, meaning a swarm of 50,000,000 locusts/km² in a large swarm can consume an astonishing 100 tonnes/km²/day of food. Locust swarms also have social and political implications due to their threat to food security and the implementation of management and control strategies. Locust plagues are sporadic and unpredictable, and will only occur if conditions are right to facilitate population outbreaks and upsurge events.
Locust control is a challenge and would be greatly improved by better cost effectiveness, efficacy, safety and reliability of management operations. In particular there are difficulties involved in predicting outbreaks given the lack of periodicity of such incidences and the uncertainty of rainfall in locust areas. However technological advances including lower cost satellite imagery, custom GIS systems and improved weather models will continue to improve forecasting of locust populations, and therefore facilitate locust monitoring
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