Locating Locusts

Desert locusts go from area to area destroying vegetation lands that people depend on to make a living, and something even worse than that is people will never be able to predict where they will go next. The desert locusts usually live in parts of Asia and Africa but can spread over wide areas. Random changes in various factors can affect where the locusts will go next and how they behave has a group. How they behave as a group is part of what makes them such a threat to the crops they go after. To describe the change in the locusts' direction of travel scientists compare it to changes is magnetic properties that happen within bunches of magnetic particles in high temperatures. Those random changes keep occuring until the locusts start to act as a group. Although scientists know how the locusts start acting as a group they can't apply this information to pin-point where the locusts will migrate next.

This relates to biology because it studies the behavior of the desert locusts. The destruction the locusts cause affects the lands that they attack which has an influence on the people and other species that need the crops to survive.

The actions of the locusts affect the people in Asia and Africa and could hurt the people in the countries that buy crops from those continents. If the locusts eat crops then there is no doubt that they eat from other places as well. The other places that they eat from could affect the wildlife in those areas. These desert locusts can clear large areas of land of all that they offer and while their bellies are full others could be empty.

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/61401/title/Swarming_locusts_impossible_to_predict