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password4321 11 hours ago [-]
A nice weekend read that doesn't smell like AI but if you're short on time or interest:
Though the locusts had a huge migratory range stretching all the way to the eastern seaboard, its reproductive range was only a handful of river valleys in Wyoming and Montana. Once plowed, irrigated and trampled by livestock the species had nowhere left to lay eggs.
pimlottc 8 hours ago [-]
This answers the title question but the most interesting part about the article is the fascinating way in which the locust’s behavior is triggered by crowding. An amazing biological adaption.
It’s well-worth reading the whole thing.
knollimar 8 hours ago [-]
It was until the animated insects. I threw my phone
FarmerPotato 3 hours ago [-]
Gotta give credit, the gimmick is not superfluous.
I don’t enjoy horror movies. But the locust was a horror!
AndrewKemendo 8 hours ago [-]
This was exactly my response
brikym 4 hours ago [-]
I couldn't help but think office politics is a bit like that. Over populate a company or starve employees of opportunities and thy will be less helpful to each other and more focused on self-promotion politics.
awesome_dude 2 hours ago [-]
It's this that always makes me laugh - right wing people demanding people act like teams, and work for the common good...
HappMacDonald 22 seconds ago [-]
Well, prisoner's dilemma defectors demanding that everyone else cooperate, obviously.
hactually 19 minutes ago [-]
right wing?
Aboutplants 9 hours ago [-]
I immediately thought of how destroying the Monarch Butterfly wintering grounds in Mexico would have the same impact on Monarchs.
FarmerPotato 3 hours ago [-]
Monarchs are threatened during migration. It’s about how many individuals survive the round trip to breed more.
Drought and fire are two natural factors that destroy their migration routes’ food supply. Another is agriculture.
Folks like Monarch Watch and Xerces encourage planting of the few milkwood species (ie weeds) that the butterflies depend on for energy or egg-laying.
Restoring prairie is also effective. But there’s still drought and wildfire.
delichon 6 hours ago [-]
I disapprove of eminent domain but this is a great steelman case for it.
daoboy 10 hours ago [-]
My earliest introduction to locusts was as a biblical plague. These Sunday school lessons did not include pictures. I always imagined some twisted diminutive demonic swarm of insects, and was disappointed to finally discover they were just grasshoppers.
themgt 10 hours ago [-]
> I always imagined some twisted diminutive demonic swarm of insects
Behavioral ecologist Stephen Simpson has proposed the cannibalistic forced march hypothesis[36], that is, the forward motion of a locust swarm is essentially sustained by each individual’s imperative to avoid being eaten by the locust behind it: 1) Align their body axis with neighbors (parallel) to minimize the chances of a side-on attack and present their narrowest possible profile to the individual behind. 2) March forward to bite and feed on the abdomen of the locust immediately ahead.
A billion crazed insects marching through eating all your crops while cannibalizing each other does seem relatively twisted and demonic.
FarmerPotato 3 hours ago [-]
Also, there’s the stimulus causing nymphs to not be solitarious slow green grass-nibbles, but instead transform into armored, black and yellow, upright marching machines that mature into stronger-winged battle bugs. With soft tasty abdomens exposed to the soldier behind them…
krackers 2 hours ago [-]
Woah up until now I was thinking locusts were a different but related species, but indeed they are the exact same species as grasshopper, just with a different end-product of metamorphosis. And the trigger is just contact with other grasshopper/locusts.
I have been in a locust plague once. It does feel very weird. Yes they are grasshoppers but you might be underestimating just how many there are. Plus they don't look normal, they actually change appearance when they're in a plague.
One small detail I remember was when the sun was just behind a building, you could see this glow around the building which was the sun reflecting off all the locusts that were flying around it
TaupeRanger 8 hours ago [-]
One locust is an interesting bug. Billions of locusts are an apocalyptic nightmare.
hagbard_c 9 hours ago [-]
Put them under a microscope at 10-40 times magnification and you've got your demons. Claws and hooks and fang-like attachments everywhere, faceted eyes, crusty exterior. The western image of demons was partly derived from insectoid creatures by painters like Hieronymus Bosch so it makes sense for insects to look demonic.
Lots of Jank still at this point in its life but the hover to popover extra context has been really helpful to keep the main post body more focused than it would otherwise be. I'm not that good at structuring my thoughts yet because I'm so new at writing (the post I linked isn't even finished).
Really interested to see others who are clearly much farther along in their writing journey experimenting with asides and popovers. Your underline animation is very cute. I am trying out a click-to-expand-acronym typing animation that I thought was kind of whimsical.
gwern 2 hours ago [-]
If you're interested in popups/popovers and sidenotes (https://gwern.net/sidenotes), be sure to check out my website. Did you notice OP also does inflation adjustments (https://gwern.net/static/build/Inflation.hs)? I do them inline, because I think that requiring effort like OP does just leads to the same pervasive lack of numerosity that providing no adjustments at all does, because no one is going to bother to hover over most of them.
hankbond 26 minutes ago [-]
Your website is wild. I am going to explore it a lot more later because there are a few more concepts that have overlap with what I am working on (like a personal kind-of wiki that I use to organize information I come across). I wanted to have a thing that grows alongside me over time and it seems very much like your website is that, but in your clearly unique way.
Are your about personal and about website pages the best place to get introduced to (what feels like) your Gwerniverse?
I also agree that the adjusted value should be displayed and if you wanted to you could popover the original value.
jeremytarpley 9 hours ago [-]
Great article. I'm also impressed by the design of the webpage itself. Love the typography and clever UI.
marking-time 5 hours ago [-]
Loved the design and the grasshopper had me pawing at my screen to make it go away!
cbdevidal 9 hours ago [-]
The jumping grasshoppers at the bottom really surprised me :-)
swiftcoder 6 hours ago [-]
They are interactive too!
swiftcoder 9 hours ago [-]
> All of these triggers cause a release of serotonin. This serotonin release triggers the physical transformation
Locusts are just grasshoppers on prozac?
PaulDavisThe1st 6 hours ago [-]
Prozac is a Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor. It is not serotonin, and it does not cause the release of serotonin.
code_duck 2 hours ago [-]
The uptake inhibition means it leaves serotonin in a place where it can be active. So, it increases the amount of serotonin available in the brain.
card_zero 9 hours ago [-]
Is it really true about the unpalatable chickens? Every mention of "caloptine" that I can find is from 1878, and derives from the annual Report of the United States entomological commission, which expressed hope of making commercial locust products, mainly formic acid. That entomological comission is the cited Charles Riley. Nobody ever seems to mention the substance again.
On that page you can click “read sample” and then search for “chicken” and the reference on page 3 seems to be the main source of that claim. Where that is quoting, I’m not sure.
card_zero 8 hours ago [-]
Thanks! So the connection between the tainted taste (source on that still unknown) and this essential oil of locust is just Lockwood spitballing:
> Although the insects had no defensive chemicals in their bodies, a diet saturated with locusts rendered the eggs and flesh of chickens inedible. Studies at the time found that the locusts were remarkably rich in a “reddish-brown oil of very pungent and penetrating odor,” and perhaps this accounts for the tainted meat.
Oil, .004 percent. Still, a little oil can go a long way, so perhaps.
alserio 10 hours ago [-]
Nice Easter egg
kasperset 10 hours ago [-]
I almost jumped. Nice touch to the article
jcgrillo 10 hours ago [-]
For a split second I thought there was an actual bug on my phone. It was an excellent article too!
mapmeld 5 hours ago [-]
I highly recommend one of the books cited in this article (Jeffrey A. Lockwood's Locust). He writes about hiking to the glacier to find preserved locusts, the formation of the Entomological Commission which discovered that existing anti-locust practices were ineffective, all sorts of details.
appleappleapple 3 hours ago [-]
The locust jump scare got me. Great article though - super fascinating. I had no idea an organism could effectively become a different species based on its environment.
archermarks 9 hours ago [-]
Really interesting article! I knew about the phase polyphenism but the forced cannibalistic march theory was new to me.
Though the locusts had a huge migratory range stretching all the way to the eastern seaboard, its reproductive range was only a handful of river valleys in Wyoming and Montana. Once plowed, irrigated and trampled by livestock the species had nowhere left to lay eggs.
It’s well-worth reading the whole thing.
I don’t enjoy horror movies. But the locust was a horror!
Drought and fire are two natural factors that destroy their migration routes’ food supply. Another is agriculture.
Folks like Monarch Watch and Xerces encourage planting of the few milkwood species (ie weeds) that the butterflies depend on for energy or egg-laying.
Restoring prairie is also effective. But there’s still drought and wildfire.
Behavioral ecologist Stephen Simpson has proposed the cannibalistic forced march hypothesis[36], that is, the forward motion of a locust swarm is essentially sustained by each individual’s imperative to avoid being eaten by the locust behind it: 1) Align their body axis with neighbors (parallel) to minimize the chances of a side-on attack and present their narrowest possible profile to the individual behind. 2) March forward to bite and feed on the abdomen of the locust immediately ahead.
A billion crazed insects marching through eating all your crops while cannibalizing each other does seem relatively twisted and demonic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uURqcI08IC4
One small detail I remember was when the sun was just behind a building, you could see this glow around the building which was the sun reflecting off all the locusts that were flying around it
Ah, so like how Wurmple may evolve into Silcoon or Cascoon and thence Beautifly or Dustox. Cool.
Or maybe it's my browser.
To OP: I have a very lateral thinking process during writing and I have been experimenting with how to format that in my personal site https://hankdoes.ai/posts/we-have-the-model-why-do-we-need-y...
Lots of Jank still at this point in its life but the hover to popover extra context has been really helpful to keep the main post body more focused than it would otherwise be. I'm not that good at structuring my thoughts yet because I'm so new at writing (the post I linked isn't even finished).
Really interested to see others who are clearly much farther along in their writing journey experimenting with asides and popovers. Your underline animation is very cute. I am trying out a click-to-expand-acronym typing animation that I thought was kind of whimsical.
Are your about personal and about website pages the best place to get introduced to (what feels like) your Gwerniverse?
I also agree that the adjusted value should be displayed and if you wanted to you could popover the original value.
Locusts are just grasshoppers on prozac?
On that page you can click “read sample” and then search for “chicken” and the reference on page 3 seems to be the main source of that claim. Where that is quoting, I’m not sure.
> Although the insects had no defensive chemicals in their bodies, a diet saturated with locusts rendered the eggs and flesh of chickens inedible. Studies at the time found that the locusts were remarkably rich in a “reddish-brown oil of very pungent and penetrating odor,” and perhaps this accounts for the tainted meat.
They were not "rich" in this oil:
https://archive.org/details/firstanuualrepor01unit/page/442/...
Oil, .004 percent. Still, a little oil can go a long way, so perhaps.