My friend, Jim, who happens to be the head of the science department at a prestigious New England boarding school, sent me this awesome youtube video from National Geographic about locusts. I’ve been fascinated and horrified by locusts ever since my girlhood days, when I read From the Banks of Plum Creek, and specifically this passage:
A cloud was over the sun. It was not like any cloud they had ever seen before. It was a cloud of something like snowflakes, and thin and glittering. Light shone through each flickering particle.
There was no wind. The grasses were still and the hot air did not stir, but the edge of the cloud came across the sky faster than the wind. The hair stood up on Jack’s neck. All at once he made a frightful sound up at that cloud, a growl and a whine.
Plunk! Something hit Laura’s head and fell to the ground. She looked down and saw the largest grasshopper she had ever seen…
The Cloud was hailing grasshoppers. The cloud was grasshoppers. Their bodies hid the sun and made darkness. Their thin, large wings gleamed and glittered. The rasping whirring of their wings filled the whole air and they hit the ground and the house with the noise of a hailstorm.
The video Jim sent me shows scientists trying to figure out what triggers a harmless green grasshopper to change, Incredible-Hulk-style, into a voracious brown flying locust. The researchers have figured out—by painstakingly tickling grasshoppers on the leg with a tiny paintbrush—that there’s a nerve in the insect’s leg that, when the leg bumps into something (usually other insects), triggers something in the insect’s brain that signals it to morph.
The swarming Rocky Mountain locust that Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote about appears to be extinct. But desert locusts still ravage parts of Africa and Asia, just as they’ve done since Biblical times.