Insectopedia (34 page)

We spent those first few days in Niamey chasing after Achebe’s paradox: How could these animals bring both feast and famine? How could they be harbingers of both life and death, bearers of both pleasure and pain? Our contacts and our conversations multiplied, and as they did, our questions changed. Soon, we were wondering if—as Boureima Alpha Gado had tactfully suggested—this was less a paradox than a confusion,
if maybe there were more animals here than we realized, if perhaps they weren’t the animals we thought they were, if maybe we weren’t always talking about the same ones, if perhaps some of this was a problem of translation. In French, everyone called them
criquets.
In Hausa, they were
houara.
We’d thought we were talking to people about locusts, but now we weren’t quite so sure.

AGRHYMET, an agricultural research organization sponsored by Africa’s nine Sahelian countries, has offices and a library in Niamey, just past the university. The helpful and generous staff members gave us a set of attractive pocket-size paperbacks, including the
Vade-Mecum des criquets du Sahel
by My-Hanh Launois-Luong and Michel Lecoq, a field guide to more then eighty regional species. Some of these, such as the
criquet pèlerin
, the
criquet migrateur
, the
criquet nomade
, and the
criquet sénégalais
, are famously destructive and have long been the object of intensive research and control measures. Others, listed by their Latinate species names, are included simply because they’re abundant or, conversely, because they’re unusual.
⁶

The
Vade-Mecum
identifies nearly all the
criquets
of the Sahel as members of the Acrididae family, the short-horned grasshoppers. Among the approximately 11,000 known species of grasshoppers, 10,000 are in the Acrididae family, including all the locusts (about 20 species). What is it that makes the locusts special? Biologists distinguish them from the other acridids by their ability to change form in response to crowding.
Schistocerca gregaria—
the
criquet pèlerin
, the desert locust, the eighth plague of Egypt—is perhaps the most characteristic of all. The harmless solitary insect is thought to be stimulated to enter a gregarious phase by the increased contact that accompanies high population density, a density which results from two coinciding but not unusual factors: higher than average rainy seasons, which encourage the insects to reproduce, followed by dry periods, which shrink its habitat, limit its food resources, and encourage it to travel.
⁷
In phase transformation, the rapid and reversible changes in the animal’s morphology (wider head, larger body, longer wings), life history (earlier reproduction, reduced fecundity, more rapid adult maturation), physiology (higher metabolic rates), and behavior are so radical that for a long time insects in the two phases were thought to be distinct species.

The gregarious nymphs—the hoppers—form into bands of thousands
or even millions of individuals and begin to march. As they make their way across the desert, other hopper bands arrive and merge with the original column. They can cover tens of miles heading in a straight line, and as they march, they pass through their five instars, stopping their journey only when they finally molt to become the adult insect.

At a critical density, the adult locusts take to the air. Until recently, it was thought that the Sahelian swarms were carried along the intertropical convergence zone to areas of rainfall favorable for reproduction. It’s now clear that rather than being passively transported on the current, the animals control their route and direction: they navigate, altering their course and orientation both collectively and individually, often flying against the wind rather than with it and stopping at attractive feeding areas as they go. It has also become clear that swarming is principally a foraging activity rather than a migratory one and that long-distance migration is more commonly undertaken by solitary adults flying huge distances at night. It is this complex combination of talents—rapid reproduction and aggregation, long-distance flight, mass foraging, and individual migration—that allows the
criquet pèlerin
to find and exploit temporary patches of favorable habitat in an overall highly marginal environment.
⁸

The scale of the swarm is well-known but still hard to comprehend. The
University of Florida Book of Insect Records
(a wonderful project!) describes one in Kenya in 1954 that contained about 50 million insects in each of the seventy-five square miles it covered, a total of 10 billion animals.
⁹
These are vast numbers and vast appetites. One locust can consume the equivalent of its own body mass in vegetation every day; only 0.07 ounces perhaps, but multiply that by 10 billion and calculate the consequences. Somewhere on the BBC website, I read the impressive statistic that one ton of locusts, just a small patch of a swarm, eats the same amount of food in twenty-four hours as 2,500 people (but which people, we might wonder?). It’s obvious but still worth stating that the impossibly high numbers are compounded by the huge distances the insects travel (up to 2,000 miles in a season) and the destruction they bring over this enormous area, as well as by their willingness and capacity to eat almost anything, not only crops but plastics and textiles. Only subground crops—tubers, for instance—are safe.

In English, the linguistic distinction between locusts and other
grasshoppers is emphatic.
¹⁰
Locust
conjures up a tight set of referents linked to rapaciousness, fear, and suffering. By contrast,
grasshopper—
at least outside the anti-acridian literature—is rarely menacing. Think of David Carradine in
Kung Fu
or of Keats’s little friend who “takes the lead / In summer luxury” and is “never done / With his delights.”
¹¹

There’s nothing in the popular use of the word
grasshopper
that calls up the
ravageurs.
But there should be. Fearsome as they are, locusts do not have a monopoly on terror in the Sahel. Even on insect terror. The other most-dreaded
criquet
in Niger is a grasshopper,
Oedaleus senegalensis
, the
criquet sénégalais.
Described as a nongregarious grasshopper because it does not change phase, it nonetheless forms hopper bands and loose adult swarms and can migrate more than 200 miles in one night.
¹²
The
criquet sénégalais
has been responsible for devastating invasions of Nigerien farmland and pastureland on a scale comparable to that of the
criquet pèlerin.
Like the desert locust, this grasshopper is a continual threat to Sahelian farmers. Unlike the locust, it breeds in areas close to cropland and has a development cycle tightly coordinated with that of millet. It’s a persistent, debilitating presence, rarely absent from the fields. Indeed, it’s often argued that the use of pesticides to control insect outbreaks has increased grasshopper populations by removing their predators. “Grasshoppers,” wrote the entomologist Robert Cheke in 1990, “afford a much greater long-term and chronic menace to agriculture than do the classic locusts.”
¹³
People in the countryside told us that even when the
criquet sénégalais
and its allies aren’t swarming, there’s terror in the slow death caused by their constant undermining of everyday life and future horizons.

Yet, it is still the case that the bulk of research and management funding for securing crops against agricultural pests is aimed at the
criquet pèlerin.
It’s partly a taxonomic disorder—a question of naming and its consequences—that grasshoppers, some of whom are identical to locusts in all significant respects, have been cast into the shade. Whereas the swarming of the
criquet pèlerin
has long provoked the full-blooded apparatus of humanitarian intervention, until quite recently farmers’ losses in their struggles with the Sahelian grasshoppers were understood only as part of the cost of growing food under marginal conditions.
¹⁴
This is also partly a problem of temporality. And of vision and visibility, too. A long-
term war of attrition hardly lends itself to the campaign politics of disaster relief. An upsurge of locusts is a crisis, with all the international media and aid-agency mobilization that a crisis entails. It is a “plague,” driven by the locust’s perverse glamour, its charisma and celebrity, generating spectacular news and both the obligation for governments to be seen combating an iconic foe and the opportunity for international agencies to step in to the administrative void.

The two most common Nigerien terms for this animal are expansive. Both
criquet
(in French) and
houara
(in Hausa) describe a motley community of insects whose commonalities far exceed their differences. Karim and I never systematically mapped this community’s boundaries, nor did we map differences between the terms, but each comfortably enfolded all the insects we were talking about: the ones eaten at parties, the ones collected in the bush, the ones caught up in children’s games, the ones sold in markets, the ones sent to homesick relatives, the ones that swarm and ravage spectacularly, the ones that don’t swarm but still ravage, the ones with polymorphic phases, the ones without, the medicinal ones, the magical ones, the ones that offer a glimpse of financial possibility, the locusts and the other grasshoppers.

One morning in the village of Rijio Oubandawaki, a dusty three-hour drive north of Maradi, a crowd of men and boys came up with the names of thirteen different
houara
in just a few minutes. As it’s women who collect these animals, who knows how many more we’d have learned if they’d been back from the fields. Eleven of those thirteen
houara
were edible. Three of them were considered especially dangerous to crops. Only one was a swarming insect. Some of the men in this big village, with its clusters of low adobe houses, its narrow lanes bordered with woven fences, its open sandy plazas, and its large concrete schoolhouse, remembered the arrival of those swarming
houara
in their youth. How could they forget? The insects stripped the fields, invaded the houses. Could they have been the
criquet pèlerin
? Or perhaps the
criquet sénégalais
? Or perhaps it was the
criquet migrateur
, once a source of terror in this region but now largely neutralized by environmental changes in its outbreak zone in Mali. It would depend on when the animals appeared. From 1928 to 1932, it was the
criquet migrateur;
from 1950 to 1962, the
criquet pèlerin;
from 1974 to 1975, the
criquet sénégalais.
¹⁵
Whichever it
was, they told us categorically, those particular
houara
have never been here since.

The biologists we met in the cities couldn’t match the animals’ lively names—chief’s knife, from the kalgo tree, sorcerer
houara
, radada (an onomatopoeia)—with their French or Latinate equivalents. They couldn’t even help us identify the dark ones called
birdé
that everyone in Rijio Oubandawaki loves to eat, which eats all the medicinal plants so is itself a strong medicine, but whose appearance in the fields is nonetheless a source of dread. Of all the
criquets
we encountered,
birdé
is the one that seems to conform most closely to Achebe’s paradox. We suspected it was
Kraussaria angulifera
, a well-known swarming grasshopper that combined with the
criquet sénégalais
in massive outbreaks across West Africa in 1985 and 1986 and AGRHYMET’s
Vade-Mecum
describes as among the most dangerous
ravageurs
of millet in the entire Sahel. Flanked by pesticide posters in his office at the anti-acridian section of the Maradi Direction de la protection des végétaux, Dr. Mahaman Seidou gave it a second life as one of the two most popular insect food species in Niger.

Nonetheless, we were starting to think of the
houara
as more protean than paradoxical: many selves, many beings, many lives. Still, here and now, in this place, at this moment, its identity seemed profoundly fixed. Locusts or not, swarming or not, food or not, income or not, they cast a shadow on the land. The facts, even if not completely precise, were unavoidable. Approximately 20 to 30 percent of the Nigerien agricultural crop, some 450,000 tons, a total greater than current estimates of the country’s food deficit (the difference between what the population eats and what it grows), is lost annually to insects and other animals, mostly birds. Here in the Maradi region, where conditions are even more favorable to insects than elsewhere in the country, that figure is closer to 50 percent.
¹⁶

Perhaps, though (we had to wonder), it wasn’t only the weight of the facts that cast this shadow over our conversations. Perhaps the depth of the shadow was also an artifact of our interest and of the resources we embodied in a country dependent on and habituated to international aid workers. That day in Rijio Oubandawaki, life’s pleasures and the
houara
’s possibilities—the food, the games, the cash in hand, the knowledge—slipped quickly out of sight. In other circumstances, it might be satisfactions
that come to the surface. But with such a brief visit, with so little earned intimacy, with just the appeal and the desire on all sides, the life most visible was the obvious—the
houara
most visible was the obvious—the one that multiplied the manifold insecurities of a profoundly hardscrabble human existence.

“I have a question,” one man said to me as we were leaving. “Can you tell us some techniques we can use to control these
houara
and protect our millet?” How could I respond? “I’m afraid I’m not really an expert in that kind of thing,” I said awkwardly, adding that when I returned to Niamey the following week, I would immediately visit the central office of the Direction de la protection des végétaux and tell the officials about the problems people here are facing. Everyone fell silent. The men with whom we’d been talking thanked me courteously but said I should understand that there was really no point in doing that.