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In the summer of 2019, as the apocalypse omens jokes still looked fresh and fun, an endless swarm of grasshoppers descended on the Las Vegas Strip.
These insects were not bites or crop killers. But for weeks after sunset, their flapping wings filled the shining Sky Beam of the Luxor Casino pyramid, and their dead exoskeletons littered the sidewalks. Media speculated that the outbreak could be attributed to a wet winter that allowed more eggs to hatch and artificial city lights, which attracted grasshoppers like moths.
New analysis confirms link to city lights – with worrying implications for grasshoppers. Elske Tielens, an insect ecologist at the University of Oklahoma, found that on July 26, 2019, the peak night of the invasion, some 46 million grasshoppers took flight and then regrouped in the worst parts. brighter city.
“It’s really hard to understand this volume,” she said. “We have more grasshoppers in the air in a single day than humans who come to Vegas to gamble for an entire year.”
Visitors, of course, already knew that Las Vegas ramped up its power at night. But some of that glow escapes straight into space, where satellites measure it as the brightest city on the planet by a wide margin. The rest of that light, overflowing into the atmosphere, forms a dome of light that the US National Park Service recently measured 200 miles away, in the Great Basin National Park in Nevada.
Insect conservationists, for their part, have spent years studying how individual lamps and nocturnal traps can be a silent siren for insects, tempting them to die. But Dr Tielens and his colleagues, inspired by coverage of the 2019 Vegas locust invasion, saw an opportunity to research a larger model. They found that roaming grasshopper clouds were also visible in weather radar data. Then, they overlaid these radar motion patterns with separate maps of the city’s vegetation and nighttime illumination.
Their study, published Tuesday in Biology Letters, suggested a daily commute. Before dusk, the locusts began to spread over a large area, gathered near the vegetation. But as the daylight faded, they took flight. Then they regrouped tens of miles apart, traveling not only to individual bright spots, as previous research has documented, but to the brightest regions of the Vegas sky.
“This is a really fascinating article,” said Brett Seymoure, an environmentalist at Washington University in St. Louis who was not involved in the research. “We really don’t have any evidence so far, with this article, that the light dome guides insects.”
Insect conservationists were already concerned about the decline of various insect populations around the world, possibly due to the use of pesticides, habitat loss, pollution, climate change and light. artificial at night. Dr. Tielens’ study, she says, does not assess how many grasshoppers have died, or how the night trip to the heart of Vegas might influence the next generation of grasshoppers. But it shows that artificial lighting can influence insects on a regional scale and that on July 26, 2019, the city shimmer summoned 30 metric tons of crisp, airborne biomass that might otherwise have been spread across a much larger ecosystem. tall.
“It’s scary from an ecological point of view,” said Dr Seymoure. “It’s also probably pretty terrifying for a lot of people in Las Vegas to have all these grasshoppers swarming around. Although I think it would be pretty cool to see.
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