How Farmers Accidentally Killed Off North America's Locusts

Locusts are a huge agricultural pest...except in North America. What happened to the Rocky Mountain locusts that once swarmed this continent? Researchers think that the colonization of the North American West might have had something to do with their disappearance.

Hosted By: Michael Aranda

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Sources:
doi:10.1016/S1055-7903(03)00209-4 (Chapco 2004)

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[Failedprodegy]

We had a locust swarm in Mississippi when I was a kid. They destroyed all of our crops we intended to sell. It was so bad we had to break up the family. My little sister and I went to stay with distant family. It was over two years before we were all together again.

[PowerhouseCell]

*"There are no mistakes, only happy accidents" - Bob Ross*

[darkfool]

Honestly, I view this as a net gain. It's easy to talk about the benefits of locusts when you live in a country without them, but the countries which still have them struggle to contain them.

[darkstar]

If any species were to go extinct in North America I’m not particularly broken up it was locusts honestly.

[kellbing]

So, locusts are grasshoppers with a mob mentality.

[JazzBuff]

From 1955 to December 1958 I was a radar operator and we picked up locusts twice during my time there. One very large swarm hit Rapid City and I actually drove on the street downtown, rolling on them. I saw them land on a tree and every leaf was gone in seconds.

[ScorchyScorch]

I'm guessing Courage returned the slab to King Ramses. Thank you, Courage!

[waterunderthebridge]

1:36 “And one day, when the world needed them least, they vanished...”

[s]

They stopped breeding due to high housing prices and unstable job prospects.

[jansenart]

What did we lose with the extinction of the Rocky Mountain Locust?

Famine, probably.

[gg]

Early 1900s farmers: "Yay America has no threat of locust famines!"
*depletes soil and causes dust bowl famine like a boss*

[KidBakz]

You make it sound like their extinction was a bad thing

[joedellinger]

There is a whole book on this called “Locust”. At the end the authors hint the locust may still be hanging on in some protected areas, but just never gets to the population densities that trigger the change to swarming mode.

Or maybe those mormon Utah settlers prayed so well that they smited their nemesis to extinction?

[KaiserMattTygore]

I'm wondering if these still exist in their "regular grass hopper" state, but lost the ability to swarm as it became a liability over the decades?

[mikemortensen]

The loss of the Rocky Mountain Locusts is supposedly the biggest reason for the extinction of the Eskimo Curlew. It was a type of bird that migrated huge distances and one stop was in Colorado and the general region, where they were feasting on these locusts, even in years they were not swarming. There were a lot of them even in non-swarming years to go around. There are other species of similar Curlews that made it, so their loss was not a huge deal.

[peachibread]

honestly I wouldn't be grouping in locusts with "one of the tragic extinctions" like the passenger pigeon.
I would probably refuse any efforts to bring them back as well.

[robpolaris]

I have a danish ancestor who joined the LDS church in the 1800’s and moved to Utah. He lived in the area near Utah lake(Now called Provo).
I believe in 1848 The locusts wiped out all their crops the first year his family was in Utah and the locusts went all the way to Salt Lake City eating anything not nailed down. The seagulls in SLC ate most of them but Provos crops were decimated.
My ancestor was a fisherman in Denmark and he instructed people in the town how to make nets, barrels and boats. The men cut down trees for boats and barrels and went fishing. He along with his sons brought in tons of fish from Utah lake, so many their nets kept breaking. The lake was stuffed with fish, mostly trout.
The women were responsible for cleaning and packing the fish in salt and repairing the nets. They put the fish in salt and the community survived their first winter in Utah thanks to Peter Madsens experience and the whole community working together.
I heard this story as a kid from my Grandmother who was born in 1920 in Provo. I later also found this story in a book called Pioneers and Prominent Men of Utah.

[LincolnDWard]

To be clear, we do still have some types of locusts — just not this particular type, and they don't form huge swarms like they used to. I used to catch High Plains locusts during the summers as a kid in eastern Colorado.

[jacekpiterow]

When it will happen to mosquito? I cannot wait. Itches everywhere...

[patrickblanchette]

1:54 Wouldn’t be the only time this phenomenon happened <Glances over sadly to a picture of the last Passenger Pigeon.>