Locust-pocust

Take one little insect that couldn’t hurt you if you swallowed it,* multiply it by billions, and what do you get?

A lot of terrified, starving humans in an empty desert.

Locust swarms are back in the news. I find them fascinating, mostly because, years back, Mom and I had our own swarming adventure with cicadas. It was a tireless, unrelenting orgy of bugs blanketing Kentucky and Tennesee, so loud you literally had to shout to be heard in a closed car, driving 60 mph down the highway.

A cicada in the throws of passion is, apparently, a screamer. And a stinker–the stench that day resembled a locker room. On steroids.

But where the cicadas were eerie, irritating and a bit nerve-wracking, locusts are downright scary. And scientists now believe they hold the key to the mystery of why desert locusts swarm, eat all the food and pretty much devastate huge areas for no apparent reason: Serotonin.

What’s a useful anti-depressant neurotransmitter in humans turns out to be a party drug for locusts: Inject a locust with serotonin, and he goes from shy little green loner to aggressive black muscle machine looking for action. Scientists found that swarming locusts had about three times the serotonin of normal bugs.

So now they’re working on the theory that hunger pangs in locusts create excess serotonin and excess serotonin makes these insects congregate in vast, aggressive numbers and pretty much take over all available food supplies.

It’s certainly a more potentially actionable explanation that the one I read six months ago: Locusts swarm because they’re cannibals, and if they don’t keep moving  brother or sister locusts will chomp their backsides. (You really need to read how they tested this theory, which proves that at least a couple of scientists need to get a life.)

By extension, I suppose, the cicadas do the same thing (has anyone checked their serotonin levels?) except that instead of food, they go looking for love.

 There’s gotta be a moral to that story somewhere.

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*unless, of course, it went down the wrong hole and you choked to death

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