🔎 Field Notes: Locusts🔎 (Patreon)

Our next episode on Tuesday, Nov. 23,  is all about locusts!  Producers Josh Cassidy and Gabriela Quirós traveled to Arizona State University to film with the Global Locust Initiative. Behind several sets of doors, the researchers there keep secure colonies of locusts for study.

Locusts might look like innocent grasshoppers, but under the right conditions, they are one of the most dangerous animals in the world. A full-on locust swarm can strip farms in hours so Josh and Gabriela needed to take extra precautions when filming them to keep them from escaping.

One of the most fascinating aspects of locusts is their ability to transform. They can turn from camouflaged "solitarious" individuals that avoid each other into gregarious locusts that swarm. Researchers can keep them in their solitarious phase by isolating individuals, or they can crowd them together to make them switch to being gregarious.

We re-created the locusts’ habitat using wheatgrass to mimic their natural food and aquariums to keep the locusts from getting out. Photo Credit: Josh Cassidy, KQED

We also filmed Rick Overson, co-director of the Global Locust Initiative, showing us how they put locusts in wind tunnels to measure how long they can fly based on what they eat. The team found that some species fly farther when fed a diet high in carbohydrates. The researchers hope that these findings might help farmers and land managers in locust-prone areas make their lands less inviting to locusts.

ASU researcher Rick Overson places a migrating locust into a wind tunnel to see how far it can fly. The locust is held in place with a small magnet attached to its back. Photo Credit: Josh Cassidy, KQED

Rick Overson of the Global Locust Initiative holds a captive desert locust. Photo Credit: Josh Cassidy/KQED

For this episode Deep Look collaborated with Emily Zarka, host of PBS Monstrum, a show that takes a closer look at monsters, myths and legends. Their new episode is all about giant locusts and the "Big Bug" subgenre of science fiction and horror films from the 1950s.

Emily came out to film with us at ASU and got up-close and personal with the locusts.

Josh Cassidy films Emily Zarka from PBS Monstrum. Photo Credit: Gabriela Quirós, KQED

This episode premieres next Tuesday, Nov. 23, but Patreon supporters will get a sneak peek this Friday!