Customer Reviews

Locust: The Devastating Rise and Mysterious Disappearance of the Insect that Shaped the American Frontier

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

"Locust: The Devastating Rise and Mysterious Disappearance of the Insect that Shaped the American Frontier" by Jeffrey A. Lockwood. Basic Books, c2004, 294 pp.

There are a handful of entomologists who can author entomology literature, in contrast to the technical writing that serves so well in science but so poorly as popular reading. University of Wyoming entomologist Jeffrey Lockwood has written a literary account which includes the very real menace of a now-extinct insect to the early pioneers of the Great Plains. Anyone who has driven across the desolate snow-swept plains in winter can imagine the immense loneliness and self-reliance early pioneer families had to survive in sod-houses far from any neighbor. But take the "good times" when summer crops were ripening and add this plague that darkened the sky and in a few days left your year's work shredded and you will understand why, between the seasons of loneliness and these acts of unjust nature, some pioneers went crazy
But if there was the threat of great loss, there was also the opportunity for clever insight. Lockwood presents history from both sides. For instance, Albert Child was in the right place with the right equipment to measure the plague that swept across the Great Plains, from the Rocky Mountains into Kansas and Nebraska. It was 1875. And the Rocky Mountain locust, a immense swarm of grasshoppers darkened the sky from June 15 to June 25. Child was a clever observer. Using his telescope he focused on a grasshopper at a known distance on the ground. He could then calculate the depth of the swarm by focusing in on specimens at the top and bottom of the swarm. And they just kept coming. The black cloud went out of sight to both the west and east. He telegraphed and found the swarm extended 110 miles northward, moving at about 15 miles per hour for all these days.
His calculations showed a grasshopper swarm that was the biggest every recorded, clouds over 198,000 square miles, compared to the 100 square miles for today's migratory grasshopper in Kenya. Lockwood estimates this at 3.5 trillion insects, over 600 hoppers for every man, woman and child on the face of earth today. In the 1870s, Great Plains farmers were decimated by these swarms. Crops were destroyed. The rotting bodies of the grasshoppers left a stench. Farmers pulled along huge rollers to crush the insects into the ground. They built "hopperdozers" a horse would pull along, trapping the grasshoppers in a trough, killing them with oil, or letting them die under their own weight. Others tried the primitive poison available at the time: lead and calcium arsenate.
But nothing even dented these swarms. They denuded the fields, laying waste to the hard work of the farmer. The mid-1870s were an economic disaster.
While every reader needs a story, and human suffering provides the story line, it is the science that is important. This book is generally filed in the libraries under 632--a science. This Rocky Mountain Locust was a grasshopper, scientific name: Melanopus spretus. As horrible as these swarms were, they were sporadic, worse when the winter was milder and dry, nearly absent when moisture helped fungus destroy the eggs. Then by the turn of the century, this species disappeared from the face of the earth.
It was almost too good to be true. But was it true? The African locust varies between a migratory phase when many eggs survive to hatch, and a non-migratory phase that does not swarm. And they look very different. Was this Rocky Mountain grasshopper "hiding" in a non-migratory phase. This is where entomologists pay attention to the reproductive anatomy of grasshoppers. The esoteric biological concepts of reproductive isolation and species concept become the critical factor in whether this pest could rise again. But the lock-and-key structures that allow a species to mate do not match any surviving species. So yes, the Rocky Mountain grasshopper had indeed gone extinct.
The biological question that remains for scientist, historian and farmer remains: how does a species, that is so numerous it blocks out the sun, go extinct in so short a time? It happened with the American passenger pigeon. If there is a scientific oversight in this book, it is the failure to detail the "Allee effect." In 1949, ecologist W.C. Allee described a phenomenon where a species may require high densities to maintain mating. But the Allee effect requires some factor, such as habitat destruction to trigger the decline. And Lockwood does pursue habitat changes.
So the question remains: what drove the Rocky Mountain grasshopper to extinction? Like detectives trying to solve a crime after-the-fact, entomologists have to work backwards to reconstruct the most likely scenario. And there is no way to be absolutely certain. Lockwood climbed glaciers to harvest century-old grasshopper remains from the strata of melting glaciers. But no molecular evidence could resolve the puzzle.
From environmental data, Kansas farmers' conversion to alfalfa provided a poor diet that lacked the nutrition to develop healthy hoppers. Another theory involves the loss of bison and the arrival of cattle. Bison roamed the high ground, avoiding the valley soils where grasshoppers laid most of their eggs. But cattle need more water, and spend much time trampling the streamsides and destroying their the grasshoppers' eggs. For whatever reason, the Rocky Mountain grasshopper has been gone for a century, and their black clouds will never again block out the sun.
Lockwood sketches many entomologists whose work is tangential to this grasshopper's life. In his last chapter addressing "What Have We Learned?" Lockwood waxes philosophical and environmental. The book is an uneven read, but represents the best literature to come from this field in the last decade.

...Or maybe three.

It starts out as a history, first talking in general terms and then focusing on the lives and work of a number of 19th century entomologists. Then midway through, the book shifts gears and becomes the story of the field research done by a modern team of entomologists. This is not a criticism, it just was a very different approach from the first half of the book. I personally found both halves very interesting, but I am equally interested in both history (where my primary interest lies) and science (when written for lay people).

My only complaint is that I would have liked more general background on the history of various types of locusts in other parts of the world. This is probably unfair, as the author makes clear that he is telling the story of one species on one continent.

If you are not interested in the scientific end, I nevertheless urge you to read all the way through. Not only is the writing very well done, but the author's proposed solution to the mystery of the locust's disappearance is one of those "aha!" moments that we all live for.

And I strongly, strongly urge everyone to pay special attention to the final chapter. At that point the author starts to turn away from hard science again, and begins almost a meditation on ecology and the value of biodiversity. But there's one final, thought-provoking twist in the story that MUST NOT be missed.

Well done!

This book tells the story of locusts, especially the Rocky Mountain locust. The author approaches the story from several directions, from the purely scientific to human views of locusts. He also weaves a mystery into the book, the disappearance and apparent extinction of the Rocky Mountain locust.

The book is best when it stays closest to entomology. Lockwood is an entomologist who specializes in grasshoppers and locusts, and he obviously knows his material. The second-best chapters are those in which insects and humans interact directly, such as human efforts to kill locusts. As an entomologist, Lockwood is one of those people.

The purely human chapters are by far the weakest. For example, Lockwood writes about the philosophical reasons for giving relief to farmers whose lands were ravaged by the insects. Well-off Americans back East wondered then whether locust-ravaged farmers were the "deserving poor" who were suffering through no fault of their own, or whether giving them relief would reward laziness or moral lapses for which they were being punished. Lockwood doesn't have any novel insights in this area, and has to fight off temptations to make clumsy analogies with the present.

By the end, we see Lockwood not only find some frozen locust bodies in glaciers but also develop the (tentative) solution to the mystery of what happened to them. Given his role in solving the mystery, it's disappointing that he isn't more insightful about how he came up with the solution. Apparently the thought just occurred to him while driving across Wyoming with some grad students.

By the way, be sure to check out Lockwood's "Grasshopper Dreaming," which is a real five-star winner.

This book was interesting, but it kind of bogged down in the middle where the author goes on & on & on about the government's failure to help out the settlers who got clobbered by the locust's depradations and about who blamed who about the locust's appearance on the prairie. The parts about his search for the Rocky Mt. Locust were very interesting as well as the parts where he discussed the insect & its life-cycle. A good editor could have pared this book down by at least 50 pages and that would have been a good thing. I recommend that you read it, but be prepared to skim a bit when the going gets dull.

Dr Lockwood has written a very readable and carefully detailed biography of the encounter of the pioneers with the Rocky Mountain Locust and the modern day entomologists' investigations of its dissappearance. He lays out a good case for the most recent hypothesis for the 'Extinction' of the migratory form of M. spretus. He also lays the groundwork for us to accept that M. spretus is still with us. His paragraphs about describing something as a PROCESS rather than an object is an epiphany that many people will never have. Also valuable and which rings true is his dicussion about how science gets done and how its as much tied to ego as it is to data. He also alludes to the stagnation now currently found in many sciences.

One thing he misses is comparing the locust to other "plagues" seen in North America that are gone - the huge bison herds, the huge passenger pigeon flocks, the huge prairie fires, huge salmon runs, etc - the North American continent used to run at a much higher energy state than it now does.

Dr Lockwoods book falls in with other Natural History investigations that introduced a new paradigm - of which the best example is the Imbries' "Ice Ages: Solving the Mystery" that popularizes a new theory while describing the challenges that led to its acceptance.

Locust swarms of literally incredible size swept through the Midwest in the nineteenth century, when homesteaders were settling, and then, toward the end of the century, disappeared. The volume of a swarm is hard for us to comprehend; if the swarm were square it would have been 450 miles on a side and a quarter to a half a mile deep-about 3.5 trillion locusts, corresponding to 600 locusts to every human then living on the earth. The destruction created was commensurate. Technological ways of destroying the insects failed but resourceful farmers turned from wheat to crops that survived the infestation better and to cattle. (Lockwood notes in a footnote the dangerous present return to monoculture in the prairies.) The response of religious leaders was ambiguous-were these swarms God's punishment on a sinful people? Government response was equally ambiguous-were the distressed farmers lazy mendicants or victims of a disaster? One compelling argument for giving aid was the threat that the Midwest would be abandoned. Besides the aid finally delivered a second government response was the establishment of a commission to do research and find a solution to the locust problem-Lockwood identifies this as the first government effort to harness science to the common good. The commission did much good science and built a scientific infrastructure but the locust swarms ceased on their own. In 1904 a Montana entomologist reported not having collected one in five years. Grasshopper plagues did occur but they were not nearly as traumatic, partly because farmers and government agencies had learned from the locusts. Theories abounded about what had eliminated the locusts: widespread planting of alfalfa? the demise of the Bison? climate change? removal of Indians? It would not be fair to the reader to give the secret away. Part of the research leading to the explanation involved digging locust bodies out of glaciers in nearly inaccessible parts of Wyoming. Certainly one of the most engrossing books I have read in a long time. History, religion, biology, public policy come together in Locust; the most important lesson, though, has to do with the fragility of the environment.

I actually really like the book and would normally be happy giving it 5 stars. But, I couldn't figure out why he didn't include any actual quantitative information. No maps. No tables. He mentions a couple of times how good the maps were in the original reports he uses as references, but he doesn't include any of them (except once as a small chapter opening illustration). Even just an inside cover map of the Permanent Zone and the range of the Locusts would have been a really nice addition.

I still recommend the book very highly.