Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/01/25/kenya-hit-by-worst-locust-plag.html
…
5 Likes
As if we needed more bad news.
8 Likes
…and next cycle Kenya will be hit with an overpopulation of birds, leading to an overpopulation of rodents and small animals… and so on up the chain.
2 Likes
Biblical proportions.
4 Likes
I was on Reddit yesterday, and literally just learned that locusts are just grasshoppers that got overcrowded, got thier legs rubbed, and turned gregarious and ravenous through a physical change.
10 Likes
This should make the’Murican Evangelicals very happy; isn’t this one of the indicators of the End Times they’re always so eager for?
So glad I’m an atheist but very sad that I’m stuck in this particular one of the multiverses.
9 Likes
Sounds like the hatch of different species has converged. Didn’t see any details in the article, no surprise, but these massive plagues happen occasionally. The different species of locust hatch on their own cycle. In North America there are two basic groups, those that emerge every 13 years and those emerging every 17 years (prime #'s reduce the occurrence of emerging the same year, interesting no?). On the rare occasion those years coincide the “plague” can be enormous. It happened when I was a child in Ohio. The noise was nonstop and all but deafening. I remember screaming to get them to stop. I was either ignored or they couldn’t hear me over their own noise.
5 Likes
American 17 year locusts are actually cicadas. The bad boys in Kenya are the original deal swarming grasshoppers.
5 Likes
Day of the Locust and no Homer Simpson in sight
https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/d/the-day-of-the-locust/character-analysis/homer-simpson
The only good news is that Locusts are Kosher:
and apparently full of protein:
6 Likes
Wasn’t there a scene in The Exorcist like this? And yeah, another plague. I’m waiting for frogs. Frogs are cute, at least.
3 Likes
Considering many varieties of frogs are threatened if not actually endangered, Imma say not gonna happen.
2 Likes
Mostly true. Only a few species of grasshoppers have gregarious forms, and of those only some swarm. The most dangerous swarmer extant is Schistocerca gregaria which is the species currently causing the problem. Thankfully here in the U.S. the closely related Schistocerca americana (see my avatar for a picture) doesn’t swarm at all
5 Likes
You’re confusing locusts and cicadas (unfortunately common). Locusts have no underground period and new generations appear twice a year
5 Likes
IIRC, the worst of the US swarming locusts (the ones that used to devastate the country) were destroyed when their breeding grounds in the Rockies were used for farmland. Hence why the US doesn’t really see swarms anymore.
8 Likes
Kind of. In the mid 19th century the biggest swarms ever seen were Rocky Mountain locusts in the American midwest. They were born in the Rockies and spread into the prairies. The U.S. mounted massive campaigns of fire, flood, plow and everything else to destroy the eggs and little hoppers. The campaign was so effective that they made the species extinct. Now there aren’t any swarming species in the U.S.
As a side note - Schistocerca americana’s ancestors flew here across the Atlantic, so there is still the possibility of swarming species returning
7 Likes
much like when united runs out of in flight meals
2 Likes
The second film:
6 Likes
This is one of the coolest things I think I have ever learned.
5 Likes
When I hear of a plague of locusts, I always think of that part in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. The villagers are happy when it happens. Food! Manna from heaven, as it were.
1 Like
