Locust: The Devastating Rise And Mysterious Disappearance Of The Insect That Shaped The American Frontier [Hardcover]

Jeffrey A. Lockwood (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 11, 2004

Throughout the nineteenth century, swarms of locusts regularly swept across the continent, turning noon into dusk, demolishing farm communities, and bringing trains to a halt as the crushed bodies of insects greased the rails. In 1876, the U.S. Congress declared the locust "the single greatest impediment to the settlement of the country." From the Dakotas to Texas, from California to Iowa, the swarms pushed thousands of settlers to the brink of starvation, prompting the federal government to enlist some of the greatest scientific minds of the day and thereby jumpstarting the fledgling science of entomology. Over the next few decades, the Rocky Mountain locust suddenly--and mysteriously--vanished.A century later, Jeffrey Lockwood set out to discover why. Unconvinced by the reigning theories, he searched for new evidence in musty books, crumbling maps, and crevassed glaciers, eventually piecing together the elusive answer: A group of early settlers unwittingly destroyed the locust's sanctuaries just as the insect was experiencing a natural population crash. Drawing on historical accounts and modern science, Locust brings to life the cultural, economic, and political forces at work in America in the late-nineteenth century, even as it solves one of the greatest ecological mysteries of our time.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Imagine looking up to see an ominous black cloud on the horizon. Now imagine your growing horror as you watch that cloud reveal itself as an immense, miles-wide swarm of ravenous insects. In Locust, entomologist Jeffrey A. Lockwood reveals the bizarre history of a bug responsible for killing countless settlers on the American plains. First-hand accounts of the Rocky Mountain locust's horrific depredations are reproduced in the book, and Lockwood adds his own vivid reconstructions:

We expect grasshoppers and locusts to consume our gardens and fields, but when these insects begin to feed on fabric and flesh something seems demonically amiss.... Although the settlers may have been astonished by the locusts' voracity, they were appalled by the insects' fierce cannibalism.

Swarms of locusts would touch down like tornadoes on homesteads and farms, stripping away every growing thing and desperately eating other insects in search of much-needed fat and protein. These hordes were thought by many, including the Mormon settlers in Utah, to be divine punishments, or at least signs from above. After describing the effects this insect had on the American frontier, Lockwood delves into the entomologic mystery of the locusts' abrupt disappearance. Had they become extinct? Or gone into hiding in some ecological refuge? When Lockwood abandons history for science, his glee for his subject keeps the book moving, albeit slower than in the first few chapters. --Therese Littleton

From Publishers Weekly

There's no dearth of eye-opening facts in this mostly fascinating, occasionally daunting, story of scientific sleuthing. Among them: North America is now the only inhabited continent without a locust species; in the years of greatest plague, 1874-1877, voracious swarms devoured half of America's annual agricultural production; the vast infestation of 1875 comprised perhaps 3.5 trillion locusts, an incomprehensible biomass stacked as much as half a mile high, 110 miles wide and 1,800 miles long; and (Fear Factor fans, take note) locusts, along with grasshoppers and crickets, were touted by one early entomologist as a nutritiously efficient food source. Lockwood (Grasshopper Dreaming), who fancies himself the Columbo of this particular disappearing-bug mystery, sometimes loses his lay readers in the fussiness of scientific methodology and the minutiae of genus nomenclature-including why the still-extant grasshopper is not a locust (however, the aside, "We spend a lot of time peering at grasshopper penises," does cut nicely through the fog of jargon). His account details years of combing crumbling archives, dissecting desiccated specimens and finally drilling into fast-melting Rocky Mountain glaciers to retrieve slushy locust body parts-an obsessive quest to discover why a species unexpectedly vanished a century ago in just a few years. This is a compelling work of popular science and ecological conjecture, buttressed smartly by an observant cultural, political, agricultural and economic history of 19th-century frontier America.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books; 1st ed edition (May 11, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0738208949
• ISBN-13: 978-0738208947
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,804,642 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Solving an Ecological Whodunit, June 22, 2004

By 

R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Locust: The Devastating Rise And Mysterious Disappearance Of The Insect That Shaped The American Frontier (Hardcover)

It is, according to entomologist Jeffrey A. Lockwood, "perhaps the greatest ecological mystery of modern times." Lockwood has studied the mystery for years, undergone grueling mountain expeditions to get evidence, compiled a solution to it, and had his solution accepted by his peers; it might be, therefore, that he has a slightly exalted sense of just how great the mystery is. But in _Locust: The Devastating Rise and Mysterious Disappearance of the Insect that Shaped the American Frontier_ (Basic Books), he has set the matter clearly for non-specialists, and has shown how he made his convincing answer to "What killed off the locusts?" You may never have wondered about this particular ecological question, but Lockwood's detailed, multi-faceted, and fascinating book provides a refreshing look at entomological and agricultural history, at how field and research science is done, and how evolution works in mysterious ways.

The impression the locusts made on pioneers in the nineteenth century cannot be overstated. They darkened the sky and ate any crops down to stubble, fed on clothes, and gnawed even the handles of farm implements. There was nothing that could be done. Of course there were religious appeals to remove the plague, and inchoate government plans to help the starving farmers. Eventually the federal government did set up programs to investigate the swarms scientifically, and huge amounts of data were collected, but it did not do a great deal of good in the short term. The farmers wanted to get rid of the locusts then and there. There were many methods of locust control, including a horse-drawn flamethrower. Finally, but through none of these efforts, the locusts vanished forever. Entomologists have thought about this for more than a century, and some interesting hypotheses have been forwarded, each reviewed here, each eventually unsatisfactory.

Lockwood's solution was from evidence gathered, among other places, high in Wyoming ridges, in the glaciers. There are very few locusts pinned in collections, but after much grueling effort he and his team found them encased in glacial ice. Before finding full bodies, they were able to do some identification by looking at the remains of mouth parts, which are distinct in grasshopper and locust species. For exact identification, though, bodies with intact penises had to be found. The penises of grasshoppers and locusts display many grooves, hooks, and curlicues that ensure that the key of the male fits only into the lock borne by a female of the same species, so a penis is the best way to know exactly what species one is dealing with. Lockwood's solution, which is too interesting to be revealed in detail here, involves some fascinating aspects of the locusts, which were in one form in their home nesting ground but developed a different body type for the migratory (swarming) phase when the home got crowded. Lockwood also drew upon the lessons we are learning from the Monarch butterfly, which also has a now-endangered home in Mexico from which it sends out migrating waves. Lockwood's whodunit is beautifully organized and clearly written to tell an esoteric story which he has in many ways fitted into larger ecological, historical, and social frameworks, and in doing so he convinces a reader of a larger importance than just the loss of one species.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Mystery solved, October 21, 2004

By 

Donald B. Siano (Westfield, NJ USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Locust: The Devastating Rise And Mysterious Disappearance Of The Insect That Shaped The American Frontier (Hardcover)

This is an interesting tale about the apparent extinction of the Rocky Mountain Locust, which so devastated the farms of the early settlers of the American West.

Lockwood begins his tale with a rather exhausting recitation of the first hand accounts of the Locust swarms, and the impact they had on the pioneers. This was, we quickly learn, horrifying and almost unbelievable to modern ears. The helplessness and despair, starvation and economic ruin! Lockwood's account is to this reader, at least, could have been a little shorter--I got to the "enough awready" stage pretty soon. But it does set the stage for the question (which I had wondered about myself): what happened to them? Why haven't they recurred over the last century? Might they come back?

Lockwood, as a young professional entomologist, was unhappy with previous explanations and decided to try to answer this question with as much certainty as he could, using real data and a little less speculation. He relates the historical hypotheses in some detail, showing the reader their inadequacies in a pretty convincing way. A nice approach is that he provides lots of biographical detail of the earlier entomologists who were concerned with the mystery, which livens up the tale too. By the time he got to his own explanation, I was ready for it, and was pretty well convinced to boot.

I especially appreciated the way he consistently tried to get quantitative about various aspects of the problem. He doesn't just say that the swarms were awful big, but calculates that the biomass at times was as large as all the buffalo in the West. There are numbers here. I like that.

I was interested to read about his expeditions to find remnants of the swarms on glaciers, his trials with getting funding and published, and the passion he has for his subject. I was a little amused by the sympathy he develops for the locust, which sometimes even veers toward a mystical reverence for them, and a regret for their passing. Not many pioneers felt that way, I think.

The twist at the very end of the book was quite startling to me. I wonder, will anyone follow up on it?

The book is a little long-winded to some, perhaps, but I appreciated the thoroughness with which he approached the work, and found it to be quite fascinating, and thought his work to be something of a triumph. I was satisfied.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Fun Insect Whodunit, August 21, 2004

By 

Paula L. Craig (Falls Church, VA United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Locust: The Devastating Rise And Mysterious Disappearance Of The Insect That Shaped The American Frontier (Hardcover)

Before I read this book, I had heard of the great locust swarms of the 19th century, mostly from reading Laura Ingalls Wilder. I had not realized that swarms of the Rocky Mountain locust no longer flew and that the insect was now believed to be extinct. This book has great stories on the experiences of the victims of locust swarms. The second half takes up the question of why the locusts are gone. It's a good example of a scientist's life and how progress gets made in science. Much of the research was done by taking insect samples from melting glaciers. (If you're not convinced yet that global warming is changing the climate, this is a good book for you.) The pace of the book drags in spots, but overall it is a fascinating tale.