African Wildlife & Environment Issue 81

FAUNA, FLORA & WILDLIFE

An Ecological Perspective on Locusts CURSE OR BLESSING?

We have been brought up, brain-washed in fact, by our euro-centric dominated ecological paradigms, to consider locusts as being insects synonymous with plague and pestilence. After all that is what the Bible tells us! When thinking about the Biblical reference, I have always wondered why God would give us an insect that causes such harm? But then the ecologist in me starts to ponder the 'problem' and this raises an interesting ecological conundrum – are locusts good or bad?

was an uproar from the ecological and conservation NGO communities. This is not only because of the long-term toxic residues that would be left behind, but also because many birds were poisoned (in one case a breeding colony of Wattled Starlings was poisoned inside a protected area). Additionally, the workers applying the poisons were not properly clothed, nor were the empty pesticide containers properly disposed of! Back then I had research funding available and Chris Boshoff, one of my recently graduated masters students, went out and did some research on locusts. Clearly, to have evolved and survived over the millennia, locusts have bred successfully every year - so they must have found suitable laying sites where their eggs are safe; and their progeny can survive to produce successive generations annually. Like all successful insects, locusts must also seek to expand their distribution and find new rangelands to colonise.All very logical ecologically!

Eugene Moll

Even in these modern times, headlines in the literature proclaiming doom and gloom as a result of locusts swarming over the countryside is something that still happens. Right now, in 2022, we are facing another outbreak in many areas of the Karoo. OK then, so let us re-consider locusts and their place in the ecology of the rangelands. And here I’m going to talk about our local species, the Brown Locust Locustana pardalina – well that is what it was named in the 1980s). In 1987 the now defunct 'South African Institute of Ecologists' held a two-day Locust Symposium in Kimberly (ISSN 0257 8638) hosted by the McGregor Museum. This was because in the preceding years there had been an 'outbreak of locusts' and the State had applied many thousands of tonnes of pesticide in their attempts at killing the swarms - and there

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