Locusts destroy crops in 'worst invasion in Sardinia for 60 years'

"Cicadas..."

Generally the answer to the 'too many bugs' question is always 'not enough birds'. Industrial farming has destroyed most of their habitation, and bird species are in decline almost everywhere [0]. I recently read that insect populations had a brief but rapid population explosion in the post war era due to the decline in bird populations from agricultural habit destruction, until pesticides came about in a big way. So we destroyed the birds habitats, then used pesticides to kill off their main food source (to the point that insect populations have nearly collapsed) [1]. We really went and stuck the knife in as a species.

With insect populations looking to bounce back again with the longer summers and warmer temperatures that the climate crisis is causing, I certainly hope bird populations make a come back with it or we're, excuse the pun, buggered.

[0] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/09/embark-d... [1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/10/plummeti...

Apparently in Asia it has a natural predator, the awesomely named samurai wasp. It's a tiny parasitic wasp that lays their eggs in stinkbugs.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/08/scientists-spent-yea...

North America used to have massive locust swarms back in the 19th century. But...

> The Rocky Mountain locust ranged through the western half of the United States and some western portions of Canada. Sightings often placed their swarms in numbers far larger than any other locust species, with one famous sighting in 1875 estimated at 198,000 square miles (510,000 km2) in size (greater than the area of California), weighing 27.5 million tons and consisting of some 12.5 trillion insects.

> Less than 30 years later, the species was apparently extinct. The last recorded sighting of a live specimen was in 1902 in southern Canada.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocky_Mountain_locust

There's a reason that the Utah state bird is Larus californicus, the California seagull, and a huge statue of it graces Salt Lake City's Temple Square.

https://www.standard.net/news/local/not-since-the-bingeing-p...

https://onlinelibrary.utah.gov/research/utah_symbols/bird.ht...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seagull_Monument

From Wikipedia[0]:

> North America is currently the only continent besides Antarctica without a native locust species.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locust

Because we accidentally exterminated the Rocky Mountain locusts[0].

[0] Minute Earth - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQ804ztWPNs

We don’t have locusts but down here in the southeast US we have cicadas every dozen or so years.

Perhaps not everyone, especially Italians, actually want to eat insects