Welcome to Tuesday Trivia!
If you are:
this thread is for you ALL!
Come share the cool stuff you love about the past!
We do not allow posts based on personal or relatives' anecdotes. Brief and short answers are allowed but MUST be properly sourced to respectable literature. All other rules also apply—no bigotry, current events, and so forth.
For this round, let’s look at: Ecology & Ecological destruction! We may all be hurtling through space on a blue marble amid an ocean of stars, but on our journey, we’ve left our mark in ways good and bad. This week is dedicated to Ecology/Ecological destruction. Use this week to tell the stories of the harm we’ve caused, the harm we’ve presented, and the people and histories around the people who knew or have learned that this is the only marble we’ve got.
In the spring of 1875 a massive swarm of Rocky Mountain Locusts ( Melanoplus spretus) appeared, and began to devour farms across the midwest USA. Albert Child was a Nebraska physician keenly interested in meteorology who had been sending regular weather reports to the Smithsonian Institution, then to the US Signal Corps when that took over as the main collector of weather information. Childs calculated the speed of the swarm, and then found out how long it took it to pass across southern Nebraska, and reported:
They were visible from six to seven hours of each of the successive five days, and I can see no reason to suppose that their flight was checked during the whole five days. If so, the army in the line of advance would be 120 hours by 15 miles per hour = 1,800 miles in length, and say at even 110 miles in width, an area of 198,000 square miles! and then from one-quarter to one-half mile deep.
It has since been known as Albert's Swarm, at perhaps 1.5 trillion quite likely the largest concentration of animals ever recorded.
Preceding swarms - notably the one that had descended upon the Mormons in 1847- had plagued farmers before, and later ones would plague midwestern farmers through the rest of the 19th c. Then the locust vanished, with the last swarm sighted in 1902. The disappearance is still a mystery. There was a theory that the locust species was still in existence, but that the swarming form was an occasional characteristic- many insects ( like aphids) will metamorphose into other forms for breeding, or hooking up with a food source. That now seems discounted. The latest theory seems to be that of entomologist Jeffrey Lockwood, who surmises that though the locusts could swarm over a large area, they originated in a fairly small region of sandy soil near the Rocky Mountains, and that the usual agricultural techniques of plowing and harrowing simply destroyed too many.
Just so y'all get reminded of where art can come from, there's been an opera composed about the locusts. And it's over on YouTube.
Lockwood, J. A. (2005, May 11). Locust: The Devastating Rise and Mysterious Disappearance of the Insect that Shaped the American Frontier. Basic Books.