[imagesource: Ben Curtis/AP]
Around two months ago, an unusual number of locusts began to descend on Kenya, having made their way from Somalia and Ethiopia.
They’ve just kept on coming, and the country is now facing the worst infestation in 70 years, piling pressure on a region that already suffers from food shortages.
Swarms that number well into the billions have been darkening the sky, before descending and decimating crops as they go.
For an idea of just how hardcore they are, here’s NPR:
“These things are voracious,” says Keith Cressman, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization’s senior locust forecasting officer. A swarm the size of Manhattan can, in a single day, eat the same amount of food as everyone in New York and California combined, he says.
Swarms of desert locusts more than three times the size of New York City — an estimated 192 billion insects — have been spotted in northeast Kenya…
Oh, just 192 billion then.
A biologist at Penn State University, David Hughes, posted some videos this past weekend showing the extent of the problem.
This video shows what is assumed to be a member of a locust survey running through the yellow swarm:
.@FAO survey on shores Lake Turkana (Northern Kenya) to assess swarm. These are yellow and of life adults mating pic.twitter.com/NY83z8zUk9
— David Hughes (@zombieantguy) February 22, 2020
He also posted this:
On Lake Turkana, Kenya today. pic.twitter.com/nr2ywclLTd
— David Hughes (@zombieantguy) February 21, 2020
Mashable below with more on the scale of the problem:
Locusts are grasshopper species that, under the right environmental conditions, undergo dramatic transformations, often changing color, growing larger muscles, developing wings, and transitioning from solitary creatures to intensely social, swarming animals.
One of these environmental conditions is a strong rainy season that (along with other factors) can set the stage for robust locust breeding. Since Oct. 2019, East Africa has been hit with unusually heavy rains, noted the World Meteorological Organization.
East Africa’s heavy rains may have been boosted by the warming climate, too. The powerful storms were stoked by a normal climate pattern that creates warmer temperatures in the Indian Ocean, known as the Indian Ocean Dipole.
Even if the locusts move off, there will likely be a “second invasion” when the eggs from the current swarm hatch in March and April.
Another video, from two weeks back:
I’ve been hearing issue of locust in Kenya, I didn’t know it is something this serious.
pic.twitter.com/zXNfjlNTUK
— Omo Ure
(@iam__temmyy) February 10, 2020
Sadly, authorities haven’t been able to get a handle on the problem quickly enough, and the worst may yet be still to come:
A massive increase by the end of March would coincide with the beginning of a planting season for Kenyan farmers. “That means when farmers are planting, they will have the potential to be surrounded by an awful lot of hungry swarms,” Cressman says, which could delay planting season and impact their food security and livelihoods.
If control efforts fail, swarms of desert locusts are likely to re-invade Ethiopia and Somalia. And the timing of yet another generation of locusts could coincide with the harvest in Kenya.
That really would spell disaster, for the farmers and the people of Kenya.
As Mark Lowcock, the U.N.’s top humanitarian official, said earlier this month, “we’re running out of time”.
