The Locust

Time for another bug post!

Did you know that, once upon a time, we had locusts in Canada?

Every year, there comes a season in our region - Northeast British Columbia - where grasshoppers seem abundant. As you walk through town, every several steps, you disturb one and send it hopping across the sidewalk; crashing into storefront windows; or flying into the street.

I watched videos of a desert locust swarm. It became hauntingly apparent from those clips that our “abundance” of grasshoppers is… nothing. A desert locust swarm is, as the Bible so poignantly puts it, an army. Forceful. Purposeful. Crowded.

But… can you believe we once had swarms like that in parts of Canada and the United States? A species called the Rocky Mountain Locust plagued prairie farmers until it’s sudden disappearance in 1902.

Some scientists (perhaps the ones fascinated by grim history and horror stories) suggest our locust isn’t extinct: just dormant in a non-swarming form. That’s one funny trait locusts have: they switch between swarming and non-swarming forms, and the two are so biologically different they seem to be different species.

I’ve put together a little storyboard about locusts and the people affected by them! Click the far right image to move forward, and the far left to move backwards.

f you’d like to help people suffering from locust plagues and other food crises, organizations like World Vision have a special fund set aside for such problems.