Everything about Locust totally explained
Locust is the
swarming phase of short-horned
grasshoppers of the family
Acrididae. The origins and an apparent
extinction of certain species of locust—some of which reached 6
inches (15 cm) in length—are unclear.
These are species that can breed rapidly under suitable conditions and subsequently become gregarious and migratory. They form bands as
nymphs and swarms as adults — both of which can travel great distances, rapidly stripping fields and greatly
damaging crops.
Locust species
Main article: List of locust species
Though the female and the male look alike, they can be distinguished by looking at the end of their
abdomen. The male has a boat-shaped tip while the female has two serrated valves that can be either apart or kept together. These valves aid in the digging of the hole in which an egg pod is deposited.
Locusts in history and literature
Bible
In Exodus, one of the was a swarm of locusts.
Greek
In
Plato's
Phaedrus,
Socrates says that locusts were once human. When the
Muses first brought song into the world, the beauty so captivated some people that they forgot to eat and drink until they died. The Muses turned those unfortunate souls into locusts — singing their entire lives.
Recent
In her novel
On the Banks of Plum Creek,
Laura Ingalls Wilder writes of a "glittering cloud" of locusts so large it blocked out the sun as it approached. The swarm descended upon her family's farm near
Walnut Grove, Minnesota, destroying a year's wheat crop and stripping the prairie bare of all vegetation.
Doris Lessing, the British writer who won the
Nobel Prize for Literature for the year 2007, vividly described a locust attack in her short story titled "A Mild Attack of Locusts". The story, published in the
February 26 1956 issue of
The New Yorker, is set in the
South African countryside and describes how a family of farmers attempts to resist the attack, to prevent and minimize the damage and to come to terms with the loss of crops.
In
Lonesome Dove by
Larry McMurtry, the cow herd experiences being in the path of a swarm of locusts whose passage lasts several hours and which strips the prairie grass around them down to the nub, and even chews on the cowboys' clothing.
In recent history, the punk rock band The Chiltons released a song entitled "the fog". In the song there are a number of gruesome images, and The Chiltons make their point clear. The world will soon be cleansed by the locust swarm or "fog" as they put it.
The 1978 film
Days of Heaven depicts a swarm of locusts ravaging wheat fields of the
Texas Panhandle, and the efforts of farmhands to eradicate the infestation.
Locusts as an experimental model
Locusts are used as models in many fields of biology, especially in the field of
olfactory,
visual and
locomotor neurophysiology. It is one of the organisms for which scientists have obtained detailed data on information processing in the olfactory pathway of organisms. It is suitable for the above purposes because of the robustness of the preparation for electrophysiological experiments and ease of growing them.
Swarming behaviour and extinctions
Research at
Cambridge University identified swarming behaviour as a response to overcrowding. Triggered by increased tactile stimulation of the hind legs, transformation of the locust to the swarming variety is merely induced by several contacts per minute over a four-hour period. It is estimated that the largest swarms have covered hundreds of square miles and consisted of many billions of locusts.
The extinction of the
Rocky Mountain locust has been a source of puzzlement. Recent research suggests that the breeding grounds of this insect in the valleys of the
Rocky Mountains came under sustained agricultural development during the large influx of
gold miners, .
Gallery
Image:Nymph of Locust - Project Gutenberg eText 16410.png|Nymph of Locust Schistocera americana with distinct wing-rudiments
Image:Locust nymph.jpg|Locust nymph from the Philippines
Image:Acrididae grasshopper-2.jpg|Egyptian grasshopper Anacridium aegyptum
Related uses of the word "locust"
The words "
lobster" and "locust" are both derived from the
Vulgar Latin locusta, which was originally used to refer to various types of
crustaceans and
insects.
Spanish has mostly preserved the original Latin usage, since the
cognate term
langosta can be used to refer both to a variety of lobster-like crustaceans and to the swarming grasshopper, while
semantic confusion is avoided by employing
qualifiers such as
de tierra (of the land) when referring to grasshoppers,
de mar and
de rio (of the sea/of the river) when referring to lobsters and
crayfish respectively.
French presents an inverse case; during the 16th century, the word
sauterelle (literally "little hopper") could mean either grasshopper or lobster (
sauterelle de mer). In contemporary French usage,
langouste is used almost exclusively to refer to the crustacean (two insect exceptions being the
langouste de désert and the
langouste de Provence). In certain regional varieties of
English, "locust" can refer to the large swarming grasshopper, the
cicada (which may also swarm), and rarely to the
praying mantis ("praying locust").
The use of "locust" in English as a
synonym for "lobster" has no grounding in
anglophone tradition, and most modern instances of its use are usually
calques of foreign expressions (for example "sea locust" as mistranslation of
langouste de mer). There are, however, various species of crustaceans whose
regional names include the word "locust."
Thenus orientalis, for example, is sometimes referred to as the Flathead locust lobster (its French name,
Cigale raquette, literally "
raquet cicada," is yet another instance of the locust-cicada-lobster
nomenclatural connection). Similarly, certain types of
amphibians and birds are sometimes called "false locusts" in imitation of the Greek
pseud(
o)
acris, a
scientific name sometimes given to a
species because of its perceived
cricket-like chirping. Often the
linguistic non-differentiation of animals that not only are regarded by science as different species, but that often exist in radically different environments, is the result of culturally perceived similarities between organisms, as well as of
abstract associations formed within a particular group's
mythology and
folklore (see
Cicada mythology). On a linguistic level, these cases also exemplify an extensively documented tendency, in many languages, towards conservatism and economy in
neologization, with some languages historically only allowing for the expansion of meaning within already existing
word-forms. Also of note is the fact that all three so-called locusts (the grasshopper, the cicada, and the lobster) have been a traditional source of food for various peoples around the world (see
entomophagy).
The word "locust" has, at times, been employed controversially in English translations of
Ancient Greek and
Latin natural histories, as well as of
Hebrew and
Greek Bibles; such ambiguous renderings prompted the 17th-century
polymath Thomas Browne to include in the Fifth Book of his
Pseudodoxia Epidemica an essay entitled
Of the Picture of a Grashopper, it begins: Browne revisited the controversy in his
Miscellany Tracts (1684), wherein he takes pains (even citing
Aristotle's
Animalia) to both indicate the relationship of locusts to grasshoppers and to affirm their like disparateness from cicadas:
Compound words involving "locust" have also been used by anglophone translators as calques of
archaic Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, or other language names for animals; the resulting formations have, just as in the case of the Brownian grasshopper/cicada controversy, been, at times, a cause of
lexical ambiguity and false
polysemy in English. An instance of this appears in a translation of
Pliny included in
J.W. McCrindle's book
Ancient India as Described in Classical Literature, where an
Indian gem is said by the Roman historian to have a "surface [that] is even redder than the shells of the sea-locust."
Further Information
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