Locusts vs Grasshoppers and a swarm the size of Japan!?

On this week's episode, we look at grasshoppers and locusts and why they're the same but also not! We also go into some crazy history about a locust species that holds the record for the largest swarm ever recorded and their mysterious disappearance. 

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Today's artists: HM Surf, After Hours, and mell-ø 

 

Transcript: 

 

Welcome to Episode 30 of insects for dummies! I’m your host Mitchel Logan and today we are getting to the bottom of what separates a grasshopper from a locust (if there is anything) 

 

Okay, to start off let's first describe and define a grasshopper because some people might even be thinking of crickets or katydids. 

 

Grasshoppers are insects in the order Orthoptera which does indeed also house crickets and katydids, but! Grasshoppers are in a separate suborder known as caelifera which stands for chisel bearing and refers to their short ovipositors. Crickets and Katydid’s belong to the suborder Ensifera which stands for sword-bearing and as you might guess has everything to do with the length of their ovipositors because these ones really do resemble a sword. Another major difference is that grasshoppers are diurnal which simply means they are active during the day, and they sing by rubbing their legs against their wings, unlike crickets and katydids who make their songs by simply vibrating their wings together. 

 

Grasshoppers like all Orthoptera go through incomplete metamorphosis. They simply hatch from an egg and go through a series of molts with each one looking more and more like the adult. However! Some grasshopper species can do something incredible and this is where Locusts come in. You see, of the 11,000 some odd species of grasshoppers, 25 are able to do something truly extraordinary and that would be their ability to completely change their appearance and behavior into what we know as a locust. This Jekyll and Hyde type transformation results from a set of conditions being met with grasshoppers in the family Acrididae.

 

 If food becomes scarce and these grasshoppers are forced together in one area, their bodies start releasing serotonin from the extra stimulation. This release of neurotransmitters causes behavioral changes which can further escalate the change from a peaceful solitary animal to a voracious horde of flying field destroyers. This is an even more likely scenario if rains come and provide an abundance of new food to this heavily gathered area causing a further increase in the population.  Ordinarily, grasshoppers cannot fly very far, but once the genes start transcribing the code for a locust then their wings become more developed and their brain actually increases in size. This change allows them to take flight AND recognize others of the same species. Locusts have actually been clocked at flying 20 miles per hour or slightly over making them rival dragonflies for the fastest flying insect and they can maintain flight for extremely long distances. 

 

For example, desert locusts regularly make a nonstop trip across the red sea which is 300km. This transformation from grasshopper to locust can occur at both the adult stage or the nymph stage and can even be reversed! The color changes are incredible as well with extremely flashy primary colors like red and yellow. This coloration is a warning to predators but also a signal to other locusts which can help them band together forming even larger swarms.

 

These swarms are usually documented from Africa, but locusts could swarm in a variety of locations. Grasshoppers with this ability can be found in Asia, Australia, Europe, The Americas and the Caribbean. The most widely spread locust is the migratory locust known as Tocusta migratoria. This species of grasshopper/locust is found in Asia, Africa, Australia, and New Zealand and its even featured in the popular video game Animal Crossing (insert bug catch music)

Locust swarms are also referred to as locust plagues due to the fact that they are incredibly destructive and can actually displace and force populations of people to leave an area. A locust swarm is not merely thousands of individuals or even hundreds of thousands. Locust swarms are usually around 40 to 80 million ravenous insects which can eat over 300 million pounds of food in one day. Yes, that’s 300, million and no I didn’t sit on the 0 key. A swarm the size of paris can eat as much as half the population of France in one day which is why these insects are a power to be feared by many people. This is especially problematic when the countries facing these insects are already struggling with natural disaster and inner conflict. 

 

At this point we’re all thinking okay but how on earth are you supposed to prevent that or prepare for something like that? The reality is trying to do anything about it once it's already started is extremely difficult especially once they have begun to fly. Nowadays people have been using biopesticides that incorporate a deadly naturally occurring fungus. We also do surveillance checks by looking at weather conditions along with aerial surveys in areas where locust swarms could potentially begin. If many grasshoppers are congregated in an area then pesticides are used to reduce the population before it can get to swarming levels. 

 

Other tactics are to lay down large bands of pesticide on the ground from the air in front of an oncoming quote unquote hopper band, which is a large army of flightless nymphs. Once these nymphs walk over the laid down pesticide the nymphs start absorbing the fungus and cannot continue. Other current pesticides involve the usage of chemicals which interact and inhibit insects but are nontoxic to humans. It wasn’t always this way though. People used to actually eat the locusts by collecting them and cooking them. To be honest it's an extremely smart and effective treatment because these guys have so much protein for their small bodies and it's all plant derived. The only issue is that this doesn’t prevent the start of a swarm and it also became unhealthy once people started using wide scale toxic pesticides in the 80s. If you live in an area that sometimes sees these swarms of locusts then I’m sure you’re familiar with how insane they can get, and I’d even love to hear about some stories if you have any! Just send me an email and if we get enough people willing to email in any wild experiences regarding insects I might be able to start doing listener stories episodes! That could be super cool. 

 

If you are living in the United States and thinking thank god we don’t have to worry about that, well there was a time when we actually did. Prior to the 1930s we had a grasshopper species known as the Rocky Mountain Grasshopper or Locust, and this was an incredibly destructive species that used to span the great planes into Canada and down into Texas through Montana, Dakota, Nebraska, Colorado, and Arizona, but was also as west as Washington, Oregon, and California. However, they would also move so far east as to actually cause farm damage in Vermont and Maine but these were only recorded in the mid to late 1700s. when swarms were being recorded for long after that until 1877 and the last living specimen was collected in 1903. The largest swarm ever recorded in the history of all insects happened in 1875 when the Rocky Mountain Locusts had such a large population boom that they literally eclipsed the sun, and formed a mass greater than the size of California and had over 12 trillion insects. Think about that for a second. This flying mass of hungry locusts was greater than the size of all of Japan and had over 12 trillion insects when we just calculated earlier that 80million translates to 300 million pounds of food in one day. So this literal giant dark cloud of locusts was able to eat an amount of food equal to 4.5 trillion pounds. One woman wrote about it in a children's autobiography stating that the cloud was hailing grasshoppers, the cloud was grasshoppers! Their bodies hid the sun and made darkness. The rasping whirring of their wings filled the air and they hit the ground and house with the sound of a hailstorm. 

 

Now, the really mysterious part of this whole thing comes from the fact that this species of locust completely vanished in the following 28 years. There were no more major swarms after the year 1880 and the last locust was collected in 1902. It’s hypothesized that the reason came from all the agricultural work that had been done through the great plains like plowing, and irrigation along with trampling from cattle. The fact is that this insect despite its immense swarms only had one small range of permanent residency in the rocky’s which also happened to be a good location for farming. At any rate, this grasshopper is no more, and the US has not seen a locust swarm since. But again, this is not the case for other countries like Africa which is now infamous for being plagued by a different species known as the desert locust. The most recent locust swarms lasted from 2019 to 2022 which started with a cyclone in 2018 that brought a lot of rain to the Arabian Peninsula. Those swarms grew and spread to various countries in the area over the span of the last 3 years, but thankfully it's finished and we currently don’t have another active swarm at the date of this recording. 

 

Locusts swarms have always been a bad omen in popular culture being associated with end times or extreme global disasters. It certainly predated the bible otherwise there wouldn’t be a famous biblical plague about them. Let’s just hope we don’t see more real-world applications as the weather continues to become more and more unpredictable…