Blight or Blessing?

Johnson has been monitoring grasshoppers for many years at the Alberta Conservation Association's Silver Sage Project south of Manyberries, for example, and has tracked a grim decline among some of its 40 species of grasshoppers. FEATURES THE EARLIEST WRITTEN RECORD of human revenge against the grasshopper was etched into a tiny tablet of greenish black stone more than 5,000 years ago. "I would say that in the last six months, more than at any time in 10 years, the news services and the people I bump into, they're all just grasshopper, grasshopper, grasshopper", Johnson says. It turns out that about 25 of the planet's 6,700 grasshopper species can alter themselves from benign, shy insects into the terrifying swarms of locusts that devastate crops - but only under pressure from very dense grasshopper populations. [Extracted from the article]