Migratory Locust

• 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 eats grasses, cereal crops and practically any vegetation available once it swarms.
• 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

Habitat & 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