LOCUST...

Locust...

Locust, now currently in news..

You can wonder that one small insect can bring a huge loss...

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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. Plagues of locusts have devastated societies since the pharaohs led ancient Egypt , and they still wreak havoc today.

Locusts look like ordinary grasshoppers—most notably, they both have big hind legsthat help them hop or jump. They sometimes share the solitary lifestyle of a grasshopper, too. However, locust behavior can be something else entirely.

During dry spells, solitary locusts are forced together in the patchy areas of land with remaining vegetation. This sudden crowding releases serotonin in their central nervous systems that makes locusts more sociable and promotes rapid movements and more varied appetite.

When rains return—producing moist soil and abundant green plants—those environmental conditions create a perfect storm: Locusts begin to produce rapidly and become even more crowded together. In these circumstances, they shift completely from their solitary lifestyle to a group lifestyle in what’s called the gregarious phase. Locusts can even change color and body shape when they move into this phase. Their endurance increases and even their brains get larger.

Locusts can become gregarious at any point in their lifecycle. On hatching, a locust emerges wingless as a nonflying nymph, which can be either solitary or gregarious. A nymph can also change between behavior phases before becoming a flying adult after 24 to 95 days.

The life cycle of the locust... 

DESERT LOCUSTS :

The desert locust (Schistocerca gregaria) is a notorious species. Found in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, this species inhabits an area of about six million square miles, or 30 countries, during a quiet period. During a plague, when large swarms descend upon a region, however, these locusts can spread out across some 60 countries and cover a fifth of Earth's land surface. Desert locust plagues threaten the economic livelihood of a tenth of humans.

A desert locust swarm can be 460 square miles in size and pack between 40 and 80 million locusts into less than half a square mile. Each locust can eat its weight in plants each day, so a swarm of such size would eat 423 million pounds of plants every day. To put it into context, a swarm the size of Paris can eat the same amount of food in one day as half the population of France.

PREVENTION: 

     There are many reasons why it’s difficult to control or prevent a plague of locusts, including the remoteness and breadth of the areas across which they’re spread and limited resources in some of the affected countries. But experts can look at past weather patterns and historical records to identify the areas where swarms might occur and spray those areas with chemicals.

Some experts worry that locust plagues will worsen in a warming world. Rising sea temperatures are causing prolonged bouts of wet weather, including a surge of rare cyclones in eastern Africa and the Arabian Peninsula where desert locusts thrive.