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There was also pictorial from The Guardian a few days ago, "Billions of locusts swarm through Kenya"[1] regarding this.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/gallery/2020/jan/24/billio...




Oh my. One swarm is ~2400 square kilometers/~930 square miles, and could contain up to 200 billion locusts. And moving at 150km per day. Madness. You can understand why various cultures have viewed them as a punishment from god.

Here's this quote from https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/invertebrates/gro...: "Each locust can eat its weight in plants each day, so a swarm of such size would eat 423 million pounds of plants every day." This is describing a swarm a "mere" 460 sq miles in size.


> 200 billion locusts

For context - there are 4 billion IPv4 addresses in total if that helps with scale of things for some.


Talk about the internet of things...


That's unbelieveable... I can't imagine that there's any real way to control swarms that large, and the idea of burning the entire country clean to starve them out seems a bit counterproductive.


Aside from pesticides, nets. Some places where bugs eat produce if not protected have nets covering and enclosing the whole farm.


If the swarm is 960 square miles, and travels quickly, how much netting do you need?


There's a good scene depicting a locust swarm in Things Fall Apart.

The traditional village that is the subject of the (fictional) story sees swarms as a blessing -- they may eat crops, but you can harvest and eat the locusts themselves, and there are so many.




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