Dear MEL Topic Readers,
Somalia declares emergency over locust swarms
Grasshoppers are usually solitary and
harmless to humans. However, under certain circumstances, they change their
behavior and habits and become more abundant, gregarious, and nomadic, called locusts.
Although an adult locust eats its own weight in food daily, or about one half of
a gram, when they become gregarious, they eat more and travel over 100
kilometers in a day and eat anything they find on the way. Such a transformation
of usually harmless grasshoppers into destructive desert locusts, including changing
the color, eating much more, and breeding much faster and more easily, occurs in a
response to overcrowding.
Located in the Horn of Africa, Somalia is a
small, poor and insecure country with its GDP per capita ranked nearly the bottom
on the world’s list. Now, they declared a national emergency as large swarms of
locusts spread across east Africa. Already poor farmers are losing their hope
for the next harvest. With this overwhelming swarms of locusts, some are as
many as 80 million locusts per square kilometer, spraying pesticide is hardly
effective to protect their farmland.
It sounds as destructive as the coronavirus
outbreak.
Read the article and watch the video to learn
about what locusts do to humans and nature.
No comments:
Post a Comment