Product Details
Locust: The Devastating Rise and Mysterious Disappearance Of the Insect That Shaped the American Frontier

Locust: The Devastating Rise and Mysterious Disappearance Of the Insect That Shaped the American Frontier
By Jeffrey A. Lockwood

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Product Description

In 1876, the U.S. Congress declared the locust “the single greatest impediment to the settlement of the country between Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains.” Throughout the nineteenth century, swarms of locusts regularly swept across the American continent, turning noon into dusk, devastating farm communities, and bringing trains to a halt. The outbreaks subsided in the 1890s, and then, suddenly—and mysteriously—the Rocky Mountain locust vanished. A century later, entomologist Jeffrey Lockwood vowed to discover why.Locust is the story of how one insect shaped the history of the western United States. A compelling personal narrative drawing on historical accounts and modern science, this beautifully written book brings to life the cultural, economic, and political forces at work in America in the late nineteenth century, even as it solves one of the greatest extinction mysteries of our time.

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #750526 in Books
  • Published on: 2005-04-20
  • Original language: English
  • Dimensions: .75" h x 5.06" w x 8.10" l, .72 pounds
  • Binding: Paperback
  • 320 pages

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
There's no dearth of eye-opening facts in this mostly fascinating, occasionally daunting, story of scientific sleuthing. Among them: North America is now the only inhabited continent without a locust species; in the years of greatest plague, 1874-1877, voracious swarms devoured half of America's annual agricultural production; the vast infestation of 1875 comprised perhaps 3.5 trillion locusts, an incomprehensible biomass stacked as much as half a mile high, 110 miles wide and 1,800 miles long; and (Fear Factor fans, take note) locusts, along with grasshoppers and crickets, were touted by one early entomologist as a nutritiously efficient food source. Lockwood (Grasshopper Dreaming), who fancies himself the Columbo of this particular disappearing-bug mystery, sometimes loses his lay readers in the fussiness of scientific methodology and the minutiae of genus nomenclature-including why the still-extant grasshopper is not a locust (however, the aside, "We spend a lot of time peering at grasshopper penises," does cut nicely through the fog of jargon). His account details years of combing crumbling archives, dissecting desiccated specimens and finally drilling into fast-melting Rocky Mountain glaciers to retrieve slushy locust body parts-an obsessive quest to discover why a species unexpectedly vanished a century ago in just a few years. This is a compelling work of popular science and ecological conjecture, buttressed smartly by an observant cultural, political, agricultural and economic history of 19th-century frontier America.
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Review
"Lockwood makes a compelling case that he has solved what he calls 'perhaps the greatest ecological mystery of modern times.' Along the way, he tells a tale of the Old West that few of us have heard before, and he tells it exceedingly well". Los Angeles Times Book Review"

About the Author

Jeffrey A. Lockwood is Professor of Natural Sciences and Humanities at the University of Wyoming. The author of Grasshopper Dreaming, he has been awarded a Pushcart Prize as well as the 2003 John Burroughs Award.