Here Come the Locusts

Here Come the Locusts

A Flying Plague It's been dry for weeks on the prairie. The corn is turning brown. It needs rain. A cloud appears in the distance. At first, the farmers are hopeful, but they soon realize that something is very wrong. The sky turns brown. Then there is a sound like hail falling on the roof.

It's insects--millions of them-landing on every surface. They chew away the corn, the grass, the trees, and the gardens. They even eat the clothes hanging on the line. Millions of jaws make a sound like a grass fire. Then, just as suddenly, the cloud rises and disappears. The farmers have lost everything. They have just lived through a plague of locusts.

Locusts Throughout History All through history, people feared swarms of locusts. Millions of these large, colorful grasshoppers seemed to appear out of nowhere. They ate every plant in sight. They ate farmers' crops. They ate grass, leaving other animals with no food. If the swarm was large enough, it could cause famine. Many ancient and religious texts talk about plagues of locusts. The swarms were often seen as a warning or punishment.

When pioneers in the United States came west in the eighteen hundreds, swarms of locusts destroyed their crops. In 1874, locusts covered the Great Plains. They ate over 5 million square kilometers (2 million sq. mi. ) of crops, the wool from live sheep, and clothing off people's backs. They even got into kitchen cupboards and ate everything inside. So many got squashed on the roads and train rails that it became too slippery to travel. The locusts destroyed millions of dollars' worth of crops. Many families had to leave their new farms.

A Flying Mystery One of the scariest things about locusts was that no one knew where they came from. During quiet years, there were no swarms or even a single locust. Then suddenly, millions appeared without warning. Female locusts laid eggs in the soil. Then the swarm moved on. The next year, everything was quiet again. No new locusts came from the eggs.