The restaurant has a wide selection of dishes
The restaurant offers a diverse range of dishes. morepellent pan may have some protection from other locusts that are looking for a meal
The Hebrew Bible describes a plague of locusts covering the ground and eating everything in sight. In the thousands of years since then, they haven’t really let up; locusts still routinely devastate crops in many parts of the world, especially Africa and Asia. In fact, they are thought to affect the food supply of one out of 10 people in the world.
But those locusts may be just as unhappy about what they’re doing as we are because, according to some researchers, a locust swarm is just a bunch of insects fleeing for their lives from one another. Locusts usually prefer to be on their own, but sometimes they get together with other locusts, kind of like college students on spring break, and set about destroying everything in sight.
Local storms are pretty complex, with swarming individuals undergoing changes in behavior, neurophysiology, and even color. There can be millions of locusts in one swarm, and they can travel thousands of kilometers, stripping every leaf from every plant that gets in their way. But they don’t just eat plants; they will also eat each other, which means that swarms aren’t just terrifying for people; they are also terrifying for the locusts.
Even though locust swarms have been plaguing humans for thousands of years, we still don’t really know why they swarm. What we do know is, as the population of locusts in a particular area increases, they lose their preference for solitary living. Scientists do have some theories regarding why, and one of the best supported has to do with their habit of eating each other during swarms.
There’s a number of possible reasons why they might do this; insects are more vulnerable to being eaten just after molting, so if there’s a lot of molters in the group that could encourage cannibalism. Also, when you’re in a swarm, you have more opportunities for mating, which means you need lots of nutrients, which you can get from cannibalizing other locusts.
According to researchers, this cannibalizing behavior may actually drive swarming, at least the behavioral elements. In 2012, scientists decided to create a computer model of swarming locusts. Computer-generated locusts were programmed to maintain a minimum distance from other locusts, but they were also designed to respond to the speed at which other computer-generated locusts moved towards or away from them. The locusts’ behavior could also adapt as the simulation went on over multiple generations.
The locusts would accumulate benefits when they approached other locusts, and they would accumulate costs when they were approached by other locusts. So some developed behaviors that made them more likely to get eaten, while others became more likely to do the eating.
At low population densities, the computer-generated locusts would spread out and avoid each other. When there were more of them, their tendencies to chase and/or avoid each other caused them to all move in the same direction, forming a swarm. So the avoidance behavior at low densities and the swarming behavior at high densities may have the same general purpose; both behaviors help protect individual locusts from being cannibalized.
If this is a good model of real-life locust behavior, it means that all the agricultural destruction that follows a locust swarm might not be so much the purpose of the swarm as a mere side effect. So basically, humans and locusts could be saved from a lot of trouble if locusts could just embrace the power of friendship.
Research from 2023 though suggests it may not all be kill or be killed; locusts may have a way to protect themselves from other locusts when they’re swarming, which might be why swarms don’t just eat themselves into oblivion before they can do any real damage. In the swarm phase, and only in this phase, some locusts produce a pheromone called phenol acetonitrile or PAN. When scientists used genome editing to remove an enzyme responsible for making PAN, cannibalism in the swarm went up. This means PAN may be like a “don’t eat me” signal. In other words, locusts that produce the chemorepellent PAN may have some protection from other locusts that are looking for a meal.