“…a perfect terrible storm.”: Crawling Mormon Crickets & Flying Grasshoppers join forces?

08 July 2021 (14:30-UTC-07 Tango 06) 17 Tir 1400/28 Dhu l-Qa’da 1442/29 Yi-Wei 4719

Children on Minot Air Force Base, North Dakota, get a lesson on how to eat crickets during a survival course. U.S. Air Force photo by Airman First Class Jessica Weissman.

When I first moved to Southeastern Idaho (25 years ago), I experienced one of the cyclical swarming of grasshoppers in the region. When grasshoppers swarm and eat everything in site they are called Locust.

U.S. Forest Service personnel instruct Marine Corps & Navy personnel how to survive by eating bugs like crickets. U.S. Navy photo by Seaman Matthew F. Jackson.

Not only was my garden in my yard being inundated with plant eating grasshoppers, but while hiking in the Scout Mountain area I observed tens of thousands of grasshoppers cannibalizing each other. In an open field the ground was undulating, upon closer inspection it was a carpet of grasshoppers doing battle, biting each other’s heads off and then eating the loser (and I they were bleeding red blood)!

U.S. military personnel taking a survival course on Spangdahlem Air Base, Germany, get a boxed lunch of crickets. USAF photo by Airman First Class Gustavo Castillo.

That was back in the late 1990s, today there is a new problem; grasshoppers (which can fly) and Mormon Crickets (which cannot fly) have joined forces by seemingly syncing their once individual swarm cycles, and it could have everything to do with the decades long drought in the Western United States (U.S.).

https://youtu.be/ZRHaLqJmtsE

U.S. Army soldier chows-down on roasted crickets during survival training on Camp Friendship, in Thailand. U.S. Army photo by Staff Sergeant David N. Beckstrom.

Another possible reason is that it was recently discovered that Utah state Department of Agriculture employees ‘mishandled’ federal grant funding that was intended for use in insect control programs, instead spending the money on transportation expenses!

The situation is so threatening to U.S. farming operations that the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) is spending $2.8-million in tax funding to suppress the new ‘Locust’. While this situation might be new to most of us, agriculture officials have been warning since 2003 of the coming Mormon Cricket storm.

Here is a list of links to recent local news reports on the spread of Mormon Crickets to new areas of the U.S., and syncing with grasshopper swarms:

COLORADO: Migrating Mormon Crickets affecting farms and children’s summer camps!

2013, National Geographic;