Known as grasshoppers and locusts, members of the suborder Caelifera are recognizable by their short, thick antennae and the location of their sound producing apparatus. Minute pegs on the hind femora (the large part of the back legs) are scraped against prominent, hardened veins on the forewings to produce sounds. Grasshoppers, aside from being a sweet, alcoholic beverage popular in the 1920's, are insects best known for their consumption of vegetation. Let it be know that locusts are grasshoppers. However, not all grasshoppers are locusts. Locusts are grasshoppers that occur in two distinct phases: solitary and gregarious. Only a few species of grasshoppers are capable of this transformation. In some species, the change is so drastic that the two forms were once mistaken for different species. It takes the right set of conditions for these unusual grasshoppers to become locusts. Typically, parallel increases in both the grasshopper population and the plants that are their food sets the stage for a locust swarm. As the population increases, the successive generations will begin to look and act different from their parents. These normally solitary grasshoppers interact more and as when mature, become a gregarious aggregation of young locusts. Locusts still strike fear in developing countries where swarms of them can denude the Earth.

Rocky Mountain Locusts (Melanoplus spretus) plauged the settlers in the western parts of the U.S.A. during the 1800's. A swarm that swept across the country in 1875 was the largest recorded locust swarm: 1,800 miles long and 110 miles wide. An account of a swarm which crossed the Rocky Mountains, heading east, in the summer of 1874 tells of total devastation. Cultivated crops were consumed in their entirety; grain, fruit, vegetables - even bulbs and roots, eaten right out of the ground (a favorite was onions). After the tasty stuff was consumed they ate the grasses, weeds, and even the foliage and bark of trees. When everything green was eaten they attacked wood, leather, and even cloth, chewing on clothing still worn by the inhabitants of the besieged settlements. Typically this took only a few days and then, in a clatter of wings, they were off to strip bare yet another swath of cultivated earth. In other countries, mainly in Africa, swarms covering 2000 square miles have been recorded several times. A swarm that size contains about 400 billion individuals. It can weigh around 500 thousand tons and is capable of consuming in a single day the amount of food equal to that eaten in one day by the combined inhabitants of New York, London, Los Angeles, and Paris. Ironically, the species of locust that caused so much devastation in the U.S.A at the end of the nineteenth century (Melanoplus spretus) is now extinct. Last collected alive in 1902, it is thought that continuous agriculture pushed them into extinction. Since locusts lay their eggs in soil and the area were they lived was intensely farmed, their eggs were eventually plowed up and destroyed! It just goes to show how something that seems invulnerable can quickly disappear.