Abstract
Connections between locusts and people date back millennia and locusts remain a major food security challenge today throughout the world. Locust biology is often linked to abiotic conditions like temperature and/or precipitation, fueling the perception that aside from active control, humans are not a key player in the interaction locusts have with their environment. However, several studies have shown that land management practices like grazing heavily influences locust-human linkages. In this review we synthesize published research and reports on connections between locust outbreaks and ranching. For this, we conducted an extensive literature search using Google Scholar on the 19 species of grasshoppers that are currently considered to be locusts or non-model locusts. Species were sorted according to their feeding guilds: 1) forb- and/or tree-feeding locusts; 2) mix-feeding locusts (grasses, forbs, and/or trees); 3) grass-feeding locusts. We reviewed their pest status, ecology, and relationship with grazing. We then discussed the overall data and draw general patterns on how locusts and locust control affect livestock grazing through various mechanisms (competition, nutritional preferences, pesticide use, nutrient cycling). We draw attention to “telecoupling” a process in which land management practices like grazing have ecological feedbacks on locust populations, which in turn affects food security in distant regions due to the migratory capacity of locusts. Finally, we present new perspectives for sustainable management practices that integrate understanding of land management.
Highlights
Connections between locusts and people date back millennia and remain a major food security challenge throughout the world today
In reviewing the livestock grazing interactions with the 19 grasshopper species currently considered locusts (Cullen et al, 2017), we found that land use has strong effects on many locust species (Table 1)
This pattern is illustrated by correlations between outbreak frequency and changes in agricultural practices
Summary
Connections between locusts and people date back millennia and remain a major food security challenge throughout the world today. Locusts are grasshoppers that, when exposed to specific environmental cues, develop into either gregarious and swarming or solitarious phenotypes (Pener, 1991; Cullen et al, 2017) These phenotypes differ in behavior, morphology, and physiology; their component traits can be decoupled, and vary among species. Behavior can change within hours for some species but other traits, such as morphology, can take several generations to fully shift This plasticity, termed locust phase polyphenism (Pener, 1991; Pener and Simpson, 2009), creates unique challenges. Groups of gregarious locusts may cross vast areas with no food and a narrower host plant breadth may mean starvation. This diet expansion, in combination with aggregation, likely heightens agricultural impacts. Understanding the grasslandlivestock-locust system will be an important contribution for solving pressing issues of food security and will provide an exploratory framework for revealing the pathways that connect human and ecological systems over large spatial distances (Cease et al, 2015)
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