ST. GEORGE — In news that’s not really news to most in Southern Utah, another grasshopper infestation is taking place.
While it’s not known if this infestation will rival the infamous 2019 hopper invasion, the winged insects are making their presence known – especially at night.
A look at the weather radar Wednesday night looks like Las Vegas, St. George and Cedar City were inundated by a strong monsoon storm. But there was no rain in any of those cities last night. It was just the swarms of migrating grasshoppers showing up in the radar.
The weather radar patterns look similar to the 2019 infestation with a massive signal around Las Vegas at the start of the night, then a glob moving off the northeast corner into the St. George area. That locust invasion started in June and reached its peak in July.
University of Oklahoma insect ecologist Elske Tielens — who authored the 2021 study that determined the cause behind the 2019 infestation was the strong light sources of the three cities in the dark western desert — has previously told St. George News that the ideal conditions for a grasshopper invasion are the kind of rainy winter the area experienced in the past couple of months that took local rivers to their highest levels in decades.
“For a large outbreak, you need the build up of several generations of grasshoppers, which happens when there are wet conditions earlier in the year and consequently lots of vegetation for the grasshoppers to feed on,” Tielens told St. George News in late 2022.
Studies like Tielens’ have shown that grasshoppers are attracted to bright desert cities like beacons, yet scientists actually don’t know for sure why grasshoppers, as well as other insects like moths, are attracted to artificial light.
The leading theory, according to the journal Science, is grasshoppers use the light of the Moon as a navigational beacon, which is approximated in the dark desert by the bright lights of cities like St. George and Las Vegas. Also of note, the Moon has been in a darker phase in the last couple of days.
A couple of other tidbits about grasshoppers:
- Locusts are grasshoppers and grasshoppers are locusts. They’re different names for the same animal. The word locust is derived from the Latin word for grasshopper. If there is a differentiation, locust usually refers to a migrating grasshopper. Desert locusts, or migrating grasshoppers, also take on a brown and tan color when they’re on the move and a green color when they’re in a solidtary/stationary phase.
- There is nothing harmful or toxic about grasshoppers to humans, and they don’t bite. They also don’t carry disease.
- While the Bible and recorded history describes swarms of locusts eating away crops. Local farmers don’t need to worry. The species native to the southwest, the pallid-winged grasshopper, has not been known to cause extensive damage to crops.
- Grasshoppers don’t have ears, but “hear” through an organ on their abdomen.
- Grasshoppers have been around much longer than humans. The modern grasshopper roamed with the dinosaurs 250 million years ago.
- Locusts have an average jump of a meter – the equivalent of a human being able to leap the length of the St. George Tabernacle.
Copyright St. George News, SaintGeorgeUtah.com LLC, 2023, all rights reserved.