Fall Armyworm Moth

• The adults are extraordinary migrants: they can cover hundreds of kilometres in a single night on high-altitude winds, which explains the speed of their spread around the world.
• It does not survive cold winters, so in North America it recolonises the continent each year from Florida and Texas.
• Its caterpillars are cannibalistic when they compete inside the same whorl, which naturally limits how many complete their development on each plant.
• It was first detected outside the Americas in Nigeria and Ghana in early 2016, and within a year it had colonised 47 African countries; today it is in more than seventy.
• It flies some 100 km a night, which would let it completely infest a country the size of Senegal in under a week.
• It feeds on more than 350 plant species, above all maize, sorghum and sugar cane.
• The damage attributed to it in Africa alone is estimated at 9.4 billion dollars.
• Newly hatched caterpillars burrow inside the plant, where contact insecticides cannot reach them; and the species develops resistance very quickly.

Habitat & environment

Maize, sorghum, rice and pasture crops in warm regions

Sources consulted: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spodoptera_frugiperda