These grasshopper are cool to look at but where I live between these and the ones they call the American grasshoppers the farmers are seeing their profits for this year just vanish. There was a story on the local news a couple of weeks ago about some people who own one of the smaller farms and they are just losing their business over these things.
I've personally picked 250 of them off my screen door since March. My usual head count for the entire season is about 1/10 that maybe?
They do make good photography subjects I will admit, but the implications of their presence in such numbers this year is just staggering. These things, and some of their relatives, are going to affect food crop availability and prices for the rest of the year, maybe longer.
There are plagues of them in several areas of the country right now. Not just the lubbers, but all sorts of grasshoppers in numbers much greater than normal. In the Midwest and also far out West Coast as well as the South. All of these areas are major ones for the nation's food supply. With the economy as bad as it has been this is a real disaster for some of the farmers, one some of them simply cannot afford.
One guy locally on the news, he was in tears. He'd lost something like 2/3 of his crops for the whole Spring. They just couldn't stop them, not physically and not with spray either. You could see the frustration on his face, and the desperation. He was clearly going under.
Between this and the mess in the Gulf a lot of people are going to end up file for bankruptcy this year, I think.
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