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Discussion (37 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Though the locusts had a huge migratory range stretching all the way to the eastern seaboard, its reproductive range was only a handful of river valleys in Wyoming and Montana. Once plowed, irrigated and trampled by livestock the species had nowhere left to lay eggs.
It’s well-worth reading the whole thing.
I don’t enjoy horror movies. But the locust was a horror!
Drought and fire are two natural factors that destroy their migration routes’ food supply. Another is agriculture.
Folks like Monarch Watch and Xerces encourage planting of the few milkwood species (ie weeds) that the butterflies depend on for energy or egg-laying.
Restoring prairie is also effective. But there’s still drought and wildfire.
To OP: I have a very lateral thinking process during writing and I have been experimenting with how to format that in my personal site https://hankdoes.ai/posts/we-have-the-model-why-do-we-need-y...
Lots of Jank still at this point in its life but the hover to popover extra context has been really helpful to keep the main post body more focused than it would otherwise be. I'm not that good at structuring my thoughts yet because I'm so new at writing (the post I linked isn't even finished).
Really interested to see others who are clearly much farther along in their writing journey experimenting with asides and popovers. Your underline animation is very cute. I am trying out a click-to-expand-acronym typing animation that I thought was kind of whimsical.
Behavioral ecologist Stephen Simpson has proposed the cannibalistic forced march hypothesis[36], that is, the forward motion of a locust swarm is essentially sustained by each individual’s imperative to avoid being eaten by the locust behind it: 1) Align their body axis with neighbors (parallel) to minimize the chances of a side-on attack and present their narrowest possible profile to the individual behind. 2) March forward to bite and feed on the abdomen of the locust immediately ahead.
A billion crazed insects marching through eating all your crops while cannibalizing each other does seem relatively twisted and demonic.
One small detail I remember was when the sun was just behind a building, you could see this glow around the building which was the sun reflecting off all the locusts that were flying around it
Or maybe it's my browser.
Locusts are just grasshoppers on prozac?
On that page you can click “read sample” and then search for “chicken” and the reference on page 3 seems to be the main source of that claim. Where that is quoting, I’m not sure.
> Although the insects had no defensive chemicals in their bodies, a diet saturated with locusts rendered the eggs and flesh of chickens inedible. Studies at the time found that the locusts were remarkably rich in a “reddish-brown oil of very pungent and penetrating odor,” and perhaps this accounts for the tainted meat.
They were not "rich" in this oil:
https://archive.org/details/firstanuualrepor01unit/page/442/...
Oil, .004 percent. Still, a little oil can go a long way, so perhaps.