Desert Locust

Fascinating facts about the Desert Locust

• A single desert locust swarm can cover up to 1,200 square kilometres and contain up to about 100 billion insects, weighing as much as 200,000 metric tons.
• When a swarm covers just one square kilometre, it devours the same amount of vegetation in a day as roughly 35,000 people would eat, turning a tiny patch of land into a famine hotspot.
• Locusts can travel up to 150 km in a single day riding the prevailing wind, and in extreme cases have crossed the Atlantic from Africa to the Caribbean in just ten days, showing how quickly they can leap continents.
• During plague years the density can reach 150 million locusts per square kilometre (390 million per square mile).
• The species can produce egg pods up to 100 eggs each, and with two to five generations per year, favorable rains can trigger a one-to-two-year cascade that fuels massive upsurges, reminding us how climate patterns drive agricultural risk.

At a glance

About the Desert Locust

The desert locust (Schistocerca gregaria) is a short-horned grasshopper that roams the arid expanses of northern and eastern Africa, Arabia and southwest Asia, occasionally spilling into southern Europe, eastern Africa and northern India during surge years. Solitary females reach 6–9 cm, males 4.5–6 cm, their bodies sand-coloured and cryptic, while the gregarious phase shrinks the insects and dresses them in vivid yellows, blacks and pinks that flash across the sky in daylight swarms. Their hind tibiae are smooth-margined with numerous spines, and the pronotum lacks lateral carinae, a subtle cue that separates them from the 30-plus other Schistocerca species that span four continents. A single female can lay an egg pod of up to 100 eggs in soft, damp soil, each pod encased in a foam-hardened membrane that protects the developing embryos until rains trigger hatching. When rain transforms desert scrub into a brief verdant feast, the hatchlings, greenish solitary nymphs or yellow-black gregarious hoppers, crowd together, their hind-leg collisions igniting a cascade that flips the species into its infamous migratory phase. In this state, swarms of up to 150 million locusts per square kilometre can devour the daily food intake of 35 000 people, travelling 100–200 km a day with the wind, soaring to 2 000 m altitude, and even crossing the Red Sea and, once, the Atlantic in a ten-day dash. Their ability to shift body form across generations, turning a quiet, unnoticed insect into a voracious, long-winged nomad, remains one of nature’s most dramatic examples of phenotypic plasticity, a reminder that a single species can rewrite the landscape of entire regions in the span of weeks.

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