Australian Crops Wiped Out by Swarms of Locusts

Giant Locusts Threaten Australian Crops

February 10, 2011

Herald Sun - A rare, giant breed of locusts has the potential to destroy crops in New South Wales (NSW) overnight, the State Government says.

The spur-throated locusts is a mainly tropical species found in Queensland and the Northern Territory but warm and humid weather has drawn them into NSW.

Primary Industries Minister Steve Whan says the Government has a plan of attack to help northwestern NSW farmers control the largest outbreak in 40 years.

"The much larger spur-throated locust is a ferocious eater and can completely destroy a crop overnight," Mr Whan said in a statement.

"Insecticides are now being made available to farmers to control densely-populated spur-throated locust nymphs on their properties."

Rangers are also being deployed to help farmers identify the creatures, which have a spur or throat peg between their front legs.

Locust Swarms Destroying Crops

April 5, 2011

ABC News - Growers in Carnarvon say they are unlikely to benefit from high prices for their fruit and vegetables, with swarms of locusts destroying much of their crops.

Yesterday, prices for Carnarvon bananas hit a new high for the year, selling for $130 a box at the Perth markets.

The prices have been on a steady rise since Cyclone Yasi wiped out 90 per cent of far north Queensland's plantations in Feburary. But, Gascoyne producer Michael Nixon says the high prices will not be good for affected growers.

He says many of their crops have been wiped out by swarms of locusts.

"If they keep coming there's going to be nothing left, and that's not only bananas, that's everything," he said.

"These things are three times the size of a plague locust and they're eating everything, they're eating gum trees, palm trees, banana trees, capsicums, melons, pumpkins, they're everywhere," he said.

"There's some plantations on South River road that are probably annihilation on a biblical scale," he said.

"Being locusts that would be a good way of describing it; they've just stripped all the leaves out of the canopy; the problem with bananas is once they've grown a bunch they actually don't produce any more leaves so the leaves that are on the plant are the factory for the bunch so if you lose your leaf matter you've lost your crop."

Mel Brady from the Carnarvon Growers Association says locusts need to be declared an official pest before the government will fund an aerial spraying program.

"It's not an easy, simple task; it's a long slow process; it goes basically through ministerials and lobbying, lots of lobbying -- you don't just get to fill out an application form -- it basically goes up to the Minister," she said.

Last month, the Carnarvon Growers Association called for an aerial spraying program to control the plague of spur-throated locusts. The association says recent flooding in the region has caused an outbreak, but the locusts need to be declared an official pest before the Government will fund a spraying program.

History Channel: Mega Disasters, Super Swarms

Mega Disasters is an American documentary television series that originally aired from May 23, 2006 to July 2008 on The History Channel.

Season 2 (2007), Episode 10: "Super Swarms" (November 7, 2007)

The locust is one of the most destructive and dreaded life forms on Earth. American pioneers faced the largest swarm of locusts ever recorded. The 1,800 mile long and 110-mile-wide cloud of insects ate their way through the heartland and blocked the sun for five days. Famine ensued, and thousands faced starvation.

According to recent studies, the possibility of such a swarm returning to the United States is very likely. The destruction would be unimaginable.

This scenario is now generally believed by entomologists to be impossible. The Rocky Mountain locust, the insect responsible for the aforementioned swarm, has not been sighted since 1902. Efforts to breed modern North American grasshoppers to recreate the locust have all failed, and recent mitochondrial DNA analysis has strongly suggested that the Rocky Mountain locust was a distinct species.

Looking Back at the Days of the Locust

April 23, 2002

New York Times - Sweeping across North America, flying hordes of Rocky Mountain locusts were once an awesome and horrifying sight, huge glittering clouds of insects laying waste to countless acres of crops. Throughout the 1800's, the whirring swarms periodically ravaged farm fields from California east to Minnesota and south to Texas.

The locusts were easy to please, eating barley, buckwheat, melons, tobacco, strawberry, spruce, apple trees -- even fence posts, laundry hung out to dry and each other.

When women threw blankets over their gardens, the locusts devoured the blankets then feasted on the plants. Farmers lit fires, blasted shotguns into the swarms and scoured their fields with so-called hopperdozers, large metal scoops, smeared with tar or molasses to grab as many of the offenders as possible. But it was all to no avail.

In her book ''On the Banks of Plum Creek,'' Laura Ingalls Wilder recalls the horrid feeling of the huge insects clinging to her clothes, writhing and squishing beneath her bare feet and the sound of ''millions of jaws biting and chewing'' as the locusts destroyed her family's wheat fields in Minnesota.

In 1875 the species formed the largest recorded locust swarm in the history of humankind, 1,800 miles long and 110 miles wide, equaling the combined area of Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Vermont. Thousands of farm families threw in their shovels and gave up.

A mere 28 years later, this seemingly indestructible enemy vanished. The last collection of a live Rocky Mountain locust was made 100 years ago, in 1902.

Now a century after the last entomologist laid hands on one of these squirming, flitting creatures, scientists say they are beginning to piece together the story of how the species may have disappeared. While still far from consensus, researchers are finding clues in places like remote glaciers and farmers' planting records in the 1880's.

''When it comes to extinction, we all hear about species that are taking a nose dive,'' said Dr. William Chapco, evolutionary biologist at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan. ''But a species that was so plentiful at one time, that is no

The disappearance of the Rocky Mountain locust, also known as the Rocky Mountain grasshopper, has inspired no end of theories among scientists. (Locust, in fact, is simply a term used to describe beefy grasshoppers that gather in perilously large and hungry swarms.)

For the most part, researchers have looked to large-scale environmental changes. Some have blamed the disappearance of buffalo, suggesting that bison wallows may have been a critical habitat for the locusts. Others suggest the reduction in American Indian populations and their use of controlled fires may have led to habitat changes that brought on the locusts' decline.

But these theories do not hold up under scrutiny, said Dr. Jeffrey A. Lockwood, entomologist at the University of Wyoming, and others. Instead Dr. Lockwood suggests the locust was more likely done in on a much smaller scale by the very farmers whom the locust caused so much misery.

''As far as I know, this is the only example of a pest insect driven extinct anywhere'' in the history of agriculture, he said.

And, he says, the settlers appear to have carried out this extermination entirely inadvertently. Rather than eliminating the locusts as they intended with fires and hopperdozers, the pioneers, Dr. Lockwood theorizes, killed the locusts by transforming the land to their own tastes, land that now appears to have been the heart of the species' breeding ground and ultimately, its Achilles' heel.

When the locusts swarmed every 7 to 12 years or so, they covered much of the continent. Eventually, however, after each outbreak, they would retreat to a limited number of fertile river valleys scattered around the West.

Unfortunately for the locust, those same valleys were favored by farmers as well. By the 1880's, the farming of corn, hay and wheat in the Western states showed a nearly complete overlap with areas identified as the cradles of the Rocky Mountain locust. The settlers brought along insect-eating birds, planted new, habitat-altering plants and let their cattle stomp the ground. Pioneers also nearly eradicated beavers, a change that brought flooding that probably killed off eggs and young locusts. But perhaps most damaging was the farming itself.

''People plowed up hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of these egg masses,'' destroying them, said Dr. Lockwood. ''It's just a vivid image of eggs littering the fields.''

But the locusts may have had other problems as well. Some have suggested the species was vulnerable to extinction because of a lack of genetic variation. Dr. Chapco said he and colleagues had begun DNA studies of the species in the hopes of testing that notion. But like other researchers, they have run up against what would seem an unlikely problem -- a dearth of specimens of this once devastatingly abundant insect.

''There were literally billions, if not trillions of these insects, but when something is that numerous you take it for granted,'' said Dr. Lockwood. ''Few people bothered to collect it, and it was gone before they knew it.''

Dr. Dan Otte, a curator at the Academy of Natural Sciences, a natural history museum in Philadelphia, said the academy had what may be the world's largest collection of the species. In total it is a trifling three trays' worth of locusts, perhaps 100 insects in all.

In fact, as Dr. Lockwood has discovered, the largest accumulation of Rocky Mountain locusts is in no museum but in the glaciers of the frozen northern states. Scouring remote glaciers in Montana and Wyoming, Dr. Lockwood and colleagues discovered the mummified remains of swarms of locusts that were blown down and trapped in the ice, some as long as 750 years ago. Studded with various sorts of grasshoppers, the ice masses were already known commonly by names like Grasshopper or Hopper Glacier, though what unusual hoppers they harbored had not been known.

''At the first glacier, all we found was a kind of grasshopper peat moss, rotted bodies, tangled legs,'' said Dr. Lockwood. The bodies were unidentifiable. ''Then we went to another grasshopper glacier, and that was our first hint that if we went to enough grasshopper glaciers we'd get lucky.''

Finally, after many long cold treks, researchers hit pay dirt. At Knife Point Glacier, in Wyoming's Wind River mountains, they found dense pockets of the long-extinct species with dozens of intact bodies scattered on the surface of the ice.

Dr. Chapco, who has received a shipment of the preserved locusts, said he and colleagues would be working to see how much DNA they can get from these long-frozen bodies.

But while most researchers interested in the species have spent their time trying to understand how the continent's only biblical plague-scale locust disappeared, one researcher believes they they may still be out there -- alive.

''I think some people would find it far-fetched,'' said Dr. Otte, ''but I don't think it's gone.''

He said the species could easily be hiding out because grasshopper species in North America remain poorly known. Many live in areas very difficult to reach. Dr. Otte said he believed the locusts still lived in the breeding areas from which they swarmed in Idaho, around the Snake River basin and surrounding valleys. But he would not be more specific.

''I'm not going to tell you where,'' he said coyly. ''I'm going to go looking again this summer and I'm going to find it.''

To most people, the disappearance of this species, which has caused so much human suffering, is proof that at least some extinctions are good. Those studying the species, however, would beg to differ.

''I'm sure if you asked any farmer, he'd say 'good riddance,' '' said Dr. Otte. But echoing other scientists, eager to study the awesome beast, he added, ''I would love to find it.''