Word: schistocerca
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Those same locusts that plagued ancient Egypt and the Israelites -known to science as Schistocerca gregaria forsk-were back again. This time, the country under attack was Ethiopia. Last week agriculture experts reported that sections of the country's northern provinces were being devastated by 33 separate locust swarms, ranging in size from 5 to 40 sq. mi. Neighboring Somalia, meanwhile, reported 17 giant swarms of the buzzing, shell-covered creatures, which can sweep 100 sq. mi. of farm land clean overnight. Jean Roy, an expert in locust control operations for the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization...
...desert locust (Schistocerca gregaria) is a hairy, six-legged, doublejawed grasshopper whose behavior has been exasperation and puzzling mankind ever since his appearance in Exodus as one of the ten plagues inflicted on Egypt by a wrathful Jehovah. Much of the time he is a normal grasshopper, evenly dispersed and foraging alone. Then suddenly, and at unpredictable intervals, he turns into a mob, blackening the skies like a tornado...
...desert locust (Schistocerca gregaria forsk) has made its name dread to generations of African and Middle Eastern farmers from Biblical times down to the recent destructive plague of locusts in Iran...
...locust's behavior is as unpredictable as the areas in which it appears. For years the Schistocerca lives a solitary, law-abiding life, the members of the clan thinly scattered over the countryside. Then, suddenly, what entomologists call the gregarious phase begins. The scattered insects somehow get together and converge in a huge, destroying swarm, leaving the land ruined wherever they pass...
...London's St. Thomas' Hospital Medical School, announced a long-suspected explanation of the desert locust's strange ways. The female desert locust, he discovered, is parthenogenetic, i.e., capable of producing offspring all by herself. In the last year, Hamilton has raised four generations of female Schistocerca in specially built hutches on the hospital roof. Regularly, his succeeding generations of females, without male help, have produced and laid their eggs deep in the sand of their hutches. All their offspring are female locusts...