Migratory Locust

• It eats grasses, cereal crops and practically any vegetation available once it swarms.
• The switch to the gregarious phase is triggered by crowding and mediated by a release of serotonin in its nervous system.
• Its migrating swarms can travel more than 130 km in a single day on the prevailing winds.
• It has the same phase change as the desert locust, and was behind Europe's great historical plagues: there are records of invasions reaching as far as France and Germany in the 17th and 18th centuries.
• Its genome, published in 2014, was at the time the largest animal genome ever sequenced, at some 6.5 billion base pairs, twice the size of the human one.
• It is the most widespread locust species in the world, with populations from southern Europe to New Zealand.
• It is one of the insects authorised as food in the European Union, and is farmed commercially for human consumption and for feed.
• Its flight capacity is enormous: swarms can cross seas and deserts riding air currents.
• In its solitary phase it is an unobtrusive, rather scarce grasshopper, and many populations never gregarise at all.

Skeleton type

Invertebrate - chitin exoskeleton (insect)

Habitat and environment

Grassland and farmland of Africa, most of Eurasia, the East Indies, tropical Australia and New Zealand

Birth weight

Tiny on hatching as a nymph (known as a hopper)

Size at birth

A tiny newly hatched nymph, wingless

Sexual maturity

~2 weeks after the final moult to adult

Gestation / incubation

11-15 days of egg development

Litter / clutch size

50 to 100 eggs per ootheca, with 2 to 7 clutches per female in her lifetime

Sources consulted: HopperWiki · Thomas More University · BYJU'S · National Geographic · Wikipedia (Locusta migratoria manilensis) · Entomologist.net · Britannica · ScienceDirect (Hughes 1989) · Science Advances, How colonial animals evolve · Wikipedia, Zooid · El medi natural del Bages i del Moianes, ficha Langosta migratoria · ficha de especie de Locusta migratoria

Best time: In the Mediterranean area the adults are found in the second half of the year. Swarms form only when the species enters its gregarious phase, today confined to the African Sahel and Madagascar