Up Next
Back to Show
Deep Look
These Swarming Locusts Are Grasshoppers Gone Wrong
Season 8
Episode 20
They might look like harmless grasshoppers, but locusts have an appetite for destruction. When the conditions are right, they transform from mild-mannered loners into gregarious partiers. They swarm, causing chaos and suffering at the level of a biblical plague. So what sets them off?
Support Provided By
4:00
Mussels create byssal threads to attach themselves to rocks and each other.
4:10
Earthworms cozy up with a mate inside tubes of slime to make cocoons full of baby worms.
3:52
What keeps the boneless, jawless hagfish thriving after more than 300 million years? SLIME
5:04
Researchers use invisible lasers, ghastly wasps and more trickery to protect orange groves
4:20
As they gorge, oblique streaktail hoverflies help keep orange trees safe from disease.
3:37
Why is that yellowjacket crashing your BBQ? She’s gathering food for the nest’s larvae.
5:04
Explore the parasite Ophryocystis elektroscirrha (OE) and ways to help monarch butterflies.
4:14
Floating colonies of red fire ants are a risk for people wading through floodwater.
3:57
These voracious predators cruise belly up below the surface of a pond or gentle stream.
4:55
Barn owls turn mice, gophers and voles into balls of fur and bones known as pellets.
4:02
It’s called nectar robbing: Bees get nectar, but don’t pollinate the plants in exchange.
3:49
Giant water bugs pack one of the most painful bites of any insect, but they're great dads.