Across the deserts from Africa to India, when conditions are right, the desert locust will swarm in vast numbers.
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Their eggs, which have sometimes remained in the ground for 20 years, begin to hatch. And the young locusts (known as hoppers) experience an increase in the speed of their development.
Driven by the smell of sprouting grass, they move to new feeding grounds. When they’ve consumed everything they can in one area, the adults release pheromones to signal that they need to move on.
And as David Attenborough narrates in footage from the BBC TV series Planet Earth filmed in Mauritania, “swarms join up with other swarms to form gigantic plagues, several billion strong and as much as 40 miles wide”.
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These swarms can fly rapidly across large distances, quickly decimating crops. This can lead to diminished food security, as seen in the 2003-5 locust outbreak in West and North Africa.
Top image: a swarm of desert locusts flying in Meru, Kenya, in 2021. Credit: YASUYOSHI CHIBA/Getty Images
