Locust wars: 38 scientists map a global plan to tame the world’s most destructive migratory pests

When locusts swarm, they do so on a scale that defies borders, budgets, and bureaucracy. A single desert locust swarm can stretch across hundreds of square kilometers, and a typical swarm of roughly 40 million insects can consume as much food in one day as 35,000 people. That biological reality has always made locust management a transboundary problem, but the institutions charged with fighting these insects have long operated in silos: ecologists in one camp, field controllers in another, social scientists and economists largely on the sidelines. Now a landmark paper published in the Journal of Orthoptera Research aims to change that, gathering 38 coauthors from 34 organizations across six continents to lay out a shared vision for the future of locust and grasshopper pest management.

The review, led by Mira Word Ries of Arizona State University together with an international team that includes some of the most experienced locust researchers and managers in the world, takes an unusually broad view of the problem. Rather than treating locusts purely as an entomological puzzle, the authors frame management as a social-ecological-technological system, often abbreviated as SETS. In this framing, the insects themselves, the landscapes and climates that drive their population booms, the pesticides and monitoring technologies deployed against them, and the human institutions, funding streams, and communities affected by outbreaks are all interlocking components. Failure in any one of them can undermine the entire response, as history has repeatedly shown.

The economic logic of locust control is central to the argument. Preventive management, in which early-warning systems detect gregarizing populations and small-scale treatments stop them before they coalesce into swarms, is widely regarded as far cheaper than reacting to full-blown plagues. Yet the paper highlights a persistent weakness: funding for locust management tends to surge during crises and collapse in the quiet years that follow. This boom-and-bust cycle leaves monitoring networks under-resourced precisely when they need to maintain the baseline surveys that make early intervention possible. The authors point to recurring fluctuations in funding, focus, and institutional attention as chronic vulnerabilities that no single nation or agency can solve alone.

To understand how the major locust-affected regions are actually governed, the coauthors examine the organizations responsible for management across the world’s key hotspots. These include long-standing bodies that coordinate desert locust control in Africa, the Middle East, and western Asia, along with national programs in the Americas, Australia, and Asia that deal with species such as the South American locust, the Australian plague locust, and the migratory locust. The paper assesses the relationships, strengths, and weaknesses of these organizations, revealing a patchwork in which capacity varies enormously. Some agencies operate sophisticated satellite-backed forecasting and dedicated survey teams; others struggle with basic logistics, political instability, or jurisdictions that end abruptly at borders the insects simply fly across.

Communication and trust emerge as themes as important as any insecticide. The authors emphasize that isolated agendas, limited transparency, and fragmented data sharing hamper both research and response. During the devastating 2019 to 2021 desert locust upsurge in East Africa and Southwest Asia, the world was reminded how quickly gregarious populations can multiply, with a single generation of swarms capable of increasing twentyfold and successive generations compounding the damage. Effective response in such events depends on timely data flowing from field surveys to forecasters to decision-makers, and ultimately to the farmers whose fields and pastures are at stake. Where those channels are weak, both crops and confidence erode.

The review also delves into the history of locust biology, a field with a remarkable scientific legacy. One of the pivotal insights of twentieth-century entomology was phase polyphenism: the discovery that certain grasshoppers can transform between a solitary phase, in which they live dispersed and relatively inconspicuous, and a gregarious phase, in which they band together, change color and behavior, and form the marching bands and flying swarms that give locusts their fearsome reputation. This shift is triggered by crowding and mediated by chemical and neurological signaling, and understanding its mechanisms remains central to predicting when and where outbreaks will occur. The paper traces how this biological knowledge, from phase theory to modern genomics, remote sensing, andpheromone research, has shaped management strategies across decades.

Modern technology is transforming the toolkit. Satellite imagery of vegetation and rainfall can flag the green flushes that signal favorable breeding conditions for desert locusts, while machine-learning models increasingly help forecasters anticipate where solitarious populations are likely to concentrate. GPS-tagged survey routes, mobile data collection, and improved GIS platforms allow field teams to map outbreaks in near real time. At the same time, the authors stress that technology alone is not a solution. Pesticide use remains the primary weapon against active swarms, but it carries environmental and human health costs, particularly when broad-scale treatments affect non-target organisms or when safety standards for applicators and rural communities lag behind. The review calls for stronger environmental and human health standards alongside continued exploration of biopesticides, such as fungal-based control agents, and other sustainable alternatives.

The social dimension of locust management receives rare and sustained attention. The coauthors include researchers from the humanities and social sciences who examine how communities perceive locust risk, how land-use decisions by herders and farmers shape habitat for outbreaks, and how the costs and benefits of control are distributed. Questions of food security sit at the heart of the matter: locust outbreaks can devastate the pastures and croplands of some of the world’s most vulnerable populations, and management decisions made at regional or international levels ripple down to household livelihoods. The authors argue that embedding local knowledge and community engagement into monitoring and response is not a courtesy but a necessity for effective, sustainable control.

From this wide-ranging synthesis, the paper draws a roadmap of transdisciplinary opportunities. It calls for sustained, crisis-proof funding mechanisms that keep early-warning infrastructure alive between plagues; for deeper integration of ecological forecasting with social and economic analysis; for open data standards that allow agencies on different continents to learn from one another; and for research that pairs laboratory breakthroughs on locust phase biology with field-tested, environmentally sound control methods. It also champions cross-sector collaboration among governments, international bodies, universities, and private actors, arguing that the complexity of the SETS demands exactly the kind of collective authorship the paper itself embodies.

Institutional response is already taking shape. Arizona State University launched the Global Locust Initiative in 2018 as a direct answer to the fragmentation the review describes, creating a hub that connects researchers, managers, and stakeholders across sectors and continents. The initiative welcomes participants interested in locusts and grasshoppers, transboundary pests, integrated pest management, landscape-level processes, food security, and cross-sectoral collaboration. As climate variability alters rainfall patterns and land use across the world’s arid and semi-arid zones, the conditions favorable to locust outbreaks may shift in unpredictable ways, raising the stakes for preparedness. The message of this unprecedented global collaboration is clear: locusts will always be a moving target, but with connected science, stable investment, and shared responsibility across disciplines and borders, the world need not always be caught reacting to the next plague.

Subject of Research: Transboundary locust and grasshopper pest management as a social-ecological-technological system

Article Title: Global perspectives and transdisciplinary opportunities for locust and grasshopper pest management and research

Article References: Word Ries, M., Adriaansen, C., Aldobai, S., Berry, K., Bal, A. B., Catenaccio, M. C., Cigliano, M. M., Cullen, D. A., Deveson, T., Diongue, A., Foquet, B., Hadrich, J., Hunter, D., Johnson, D. L., Pablo Karnatz, J., Lange, C. E., Lawton, D., Lazar, M., Latchininsky, A. V., … Cease, A. (2024). Global perspectives and transdisciplinary opportunities for locust and grasshopper pest management and research. Journal of Orthoptera Research, 33(2), 169-216. https://doi.org/10.3897/jor.33.112803

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/jor.33.112803

Keywords: locusts, grasshoppers, pest management, transboundary pests, desert locust, swarms, integrated pest management, food security, early warning systems, pesticide use, Global Locust Initiative, social-ecological-technological system