07/10/2026
The Insect That Starved Empires 🦗
A single locust doesn't scare anyone. A swarm of them once ate its way through entire civilizations.
Ancient Egyptian texts describe locust plagues so severe they were recorded as one of the ten plagues visited on the pharaoh. Rome kept official locust-hunting units along its African grain frontier, because a bad swarm year meant bread shortages in the capital itself. In 1874, a single swarm crossing the American Great Plains, later named the "Albert swarm," is estimated to have covered close to 200,000 square miles and contained trillions of insects, the largest swarm ever documented.
The mechanism is deceptively simple. Certain grasshopper species shift from a shy, solitary phase into a swarming "gregarious" phase when their populations get dense enough, triggered by repeated leg contact with other grasshoppers. Once that switch flips, they band together, breed faster, and strip fields bare as they move, sometimes travelling 100 miles in a single day.
Locust plagues still happen. East Africa faced its worst outbreak in decades between 2019 and 2022, destroying crops across multiple countries and threatening food security for millions.
One insect, one behavioral switch, and the difference between a good harvest and a famine.
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