Locust: The Devastating Rise
and Mysterious Disappearance of the Insect that Shaped
the American Frontier
Jeffrey A. Lockwood.
2004. Basic Books, New York. 293 pp., hardbound. $25.
Did the 17-year cicadas that erupted in the eastern U.S. this year have you bugged? Be glad you weren't the pioneer who reported locusts so voracious that they ate the clothes off people trying to repel them from their fields. And clothes weren't the worst of the losses suffered by farmers unlucky enough to be visited by these pests that swarmed in unimaginably large numbers: "Their devastation was like that of a living wildfire, consuming fifty tons of vegetation per day to fuel a typical swarm." The sound of millions of buzzing, munching insects was deafening; the stench of their rotting corpses suffocating.
But bigger than the biggest of wildfires, in 1875 a single swarm of some 3.5 trillion locusts covered an estimated area of 198,000 square miles in the American West, equivalent to the combined areas of Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont. The Rocky Mountain locust (Melanoplus spretus) was a scourge of far more than Biblical proportions in the late 19th century. It caused farmers to starve, brought trains to a halt, and threatened the expansion of the nation. And then it disappeared. The last two living specimens were collected in 1902 (they are in the Smithsonian's insect collection) and in the 1950s the species was finally declared extinct. Only recently, however, was a satisfactory explanation for the sudden extinction of this once-superabundant species proposed, by Jeffrey A. Lockwood, a University of Wyoming entomologist and author of Locust.
Interweaving locust biology, American frontier history, and the history of entomology in the U.S. with his personal quest to solve the mystery of the locust's extinction, Lockwood tells a great detective story and, like many mysteries do, his tale has a surprise ending that I won't reveal here. But we learn some fascinating things along the way too.
One part of the book, for example, details the political response to the sudden destitution of the farmers who lost everything to locusts. Initially, the federal government basically told these hungry people to work harder. Poverty, even that arising from a natural disaster, then carried the scent of moral failure—and what better than a plague of locusts to suggest that these people were being punished for their sins? Eventually, however, under enormous pressure from state governors and goaded by industrialists who saw the locusts undermining their economic interests in the settlement of the West, the federal government provided a modicum of relief in the form of food, clothing, and seeds. As Lockwood puts it, "A hungry farmer was one thing, an angry capitalist was something else indeed."
Another, and more far-reaching, federal response was the formation of a commission charged with studying the problem. Another section of Locust describes the three extraordinary entomologists appointed to the commission, men who founded the science of economic entomology and put science at the forefront of agricultural policy in the U.S.
Lockwood credits the commission with pioneering integrated pest management, and one of its members, Charles Valentine Riley, "single handedly saved the French wine industry" based on his studies of the insect pest called grape phylloxera. Riley also became an honorary curator of entomology at the Smithsonian and started the national insect collection there. Another member, Cyrus Thomas, later abandoned entomology and achieved eminence as a Smithsonian archaeologist.
The commission's findings on locusts, such as the efficacy of flood irrigation in destroying locust eggs, helped farmers to reduce their losses. But unrelated to the commission's work, although contributing to its credibility, the locusts were on the wane by the 1880s and soon vanished, from the country and from most of our memories, their demise a serendipitous side effect of the Rocky Mountain gold rush.
Other colorful characters people this book, belying any thoughts about entomologists being dull sorts, and the author himself seems to be in this tradition. To solve the mystery of the locust's extinction, Lockwood made harrowing expeditions to remote—and, thanks to global warming, rapidly melting—glaciers in search of the remains of Rocky Mountain locusts trapped in the ice, endured the ridicule of his colleagues, and mined the literature on locusts from around the world with a voracity not unlike that of the insects he studies. He earned his success and readers will be highly satisfied with his story's denouement.
Finally, Lockwood asks questions about how people value wildlife. No one, except perhaps Lockwood, mourns the passing of the Rocky Mountain locust. Its demise is sometimes hailed as the equivalent of the elimination of small pox, rather than being sadly compared to the loss of America's once-vast population of passenger pigeons, in its time another major pest of farm crops. "What," he asks, "if I found a pocket of habitat still harboring these once glorious creatures?" Read Locust, then answer this question for yourself.
—Susan Lumpkin
ZooGoer 33(4) 2004.
Copyright 2004 Friends of the National Zoo.
All rights reserved.
