Locust (23 page)

A Montana entomologist might have been the first to sound a note of suspicion in 1904, in reporting that he’d failed to collect a specimen in five years. In 1913, the Nebraska state entomologist added, “So far as our information goes, the true Rocky Mountain grasshopper did not occur anywhere in the state during the abnormal abundance of grasshoppers in the past four years.” At the same time, Melvin P. Somes, a rather peripatetic entomologist then working in Minnesota, became the first person to broach the possibility of extinction. He suggested that the Rocky Mountain locust, “is today apparently extinct, or practically so.”

The author of a 1917 bulletin from the Utah Agricultural Experiment Station took a rather more cautious stand, noting, “The Rocky Mountain locust, with its long wings and wonderful power of flight, is a thing of the past. Like the buffalo, another inhabitant of the same region, his millions have dwindled almost to extinction. We still see the buffalo in our parks and museums, but a Rocky Mountain locust would be a greater curiosity today than a buffalo.” The writer maintained that he’d kept a sharp lookout for this species in all his travels in the West since 1900 and had not seen a single one.

In the same year, Norman Criddle—unaware that he was likely the last human to see the Rocky Mountain locust—was also struggling to comprehend the locust’s vanishing act. He’d received a government appointment and funds for a laboratory a few years earlier,
and he was quickly making his mark in the field of entomology. He wrote:

By now, Criddle hadn’t seen a locust for fifteen years, and it was starting to look as if Riley’s Permanent Zone was incredibly ephemeral.

Cognitive dissonance—the utter disbelief that a creature so abundant, so absolutely dominant on a continental scale could actually be gone—became the prevailing mind-set. The USDA reflected this uncertainty in its noncommittal position in 1927. The agency simply stated that the Rocky Mountain locust had “ceased to be a pest of any great importance.” In our hypothetical scenario involving hurricanes, the National Weather Service might similarly hedge its statements: “Tropical storms of hurricane intensity have, for some time, ceased to be significant weather events.” But government scientists were not the only ones reluctant to declare that events of such staggering proportions as locust plagues were safely relegated to history. Even in 1931, more than forty years after the last encounter with a locust swarm in his state, William W. Henderson, an entomologist from Utah, couldn’t bring himself to believe that this species was gone. He maintained that the disappearance was more a matter of muddled science than an ecological reality: “What has become of the old-time Rocky Mountain locust causing clouds in the sky several miles wide, 10 or 12 miles long, and thick enough to hide the sun? It is probably extant, if it were possible to solve the confusion associated with it.”

Norman Criddle died in 1933, still uncertain as to the fate of the Rocky Mountain locust. However, his inability to come to terms with the disappearance of this creature was echoed in expressions of ambivalence that prevailed into the 1950s. USDA scientists cautiously noted that there had been “no recurrence of the tremendous, devastating
flights of the last century.” The foremost experts felt compelled to leave open the possibility that the Rocky Mountain locust was still lurking in a remote corner of the West. And such became the standard view in science.

From the turn of the last century to the turn of the present one, entomologists gradually accepted that the Rocky Mountain locust was not coming back. Today, they now openly and flatly assert that locust swarms are a thing of the past. If pushed, some might concede that a few individuals of the Rocky Mountain locust could be hiding out somewhere like an aging gang of bandits. But as a force of nature this species is a washed-up has-been with no possibility of returning to its former glory.

 

The history of the last 120 years leaves no doubt that the Rocky Mountain locust—at least, the ecological manifestation of this creature—is gone. The caveat here reveals a profound intuition about what is “real” in the natural world. It is as if the swarm or even the process of swarming, rather than the individual locusts within the swarm, constituted this remarkable species. This insight is counter to the material terms in which we usually conceive of the world. For example, we typically define a species as a bunch of individuals with the capacity to successfully interbreed. But this definition presumes the metaphysical truth of materialism. It equates being real with being made of matter, and the Rocky Mountain locust challenges this perception.

Ecology is beginning to slowly shift focus with tentative explorations of what the world would look like if process, rather than matter, were the basis for reality. What if we defined a species in terms of its life processes? We might seriously doubt whether the California condor or the tallgrass prairie can be “saved” or even “restored.” Perhaps we can re-create some local conditions that foster a few nests of condors or a few acres of prairie. But the life process of the condor ended with the urbanization of the California foothills, and the living ebb and flow of the tallgrass prairies died with the plowing of the Great Plains. What if we suggested that a thing
is
what it
does
? In this light, the Rocky Mountain locust was an immense, aperiodic energy flow that linked life processes on a continental scale.

If we choose to describe the locust as a process, there is no doubt that this species was extinct in the late 1800s. That is, its ecological role and biological activities ceased well before its last corporeal manifestation disappeared. This notion of life-as-process might seem unusual in a society in which material existence is primary. But such a perception informs our deepest understanding of life. Indeed, life-as-process underlies our notion of euthanasia. When loved ones are simply bodies, devoid of the capacity to care, respond, or relate ever again in a way that we can recognize as being “them,” we understand that they are gone even before they are dead.

There is no question that the Rocky Mountain locust as a dynamic phenomenon disappeared a century ago. But biological existence is far more often transformed than destroyed. How many of us could see a gorgeous flitting butterfly and then identify the drab caterpillar from which it metamorphosed, or pass by the sandstone formations of the desert Southwest and recognize them as the resurrected seafloor of the Cretaceous? Although swarms of locusts no longer descend on our towns and farms, could the Rocky Mountain locust itself—the material entity—still exist, but in a form that we don’t readily recognize?

When Charles Riley witnessed clouds of locusts and Norman Criddle held the last known specimens, these eminent scientists did not imagine that the locust had a great secret. They knew that some insects could metamorphose from larva, to pupa, to adult. The other insects, including the grasshoppers, become gradually larger without any radical changes in form. A newly hatched grasshopper looks very much like a miniature version of the adult. It lacks wings, but most people would, with a bit of magnification, immediately recognize it as a “baby grasshopper.” Locusts, however, represent an entirely different capacity to change their form. This ability to transform their identity confused biologists for nearly 200 years—and cast our understanding of the Rocky Mountain locust’s identity and fate into disarray for much of the twentieth century.

I
N 1889, THE CRIDDLES’ ESTATE BECAME THE FOCUS of attention for the district. People were coming from all over the countryside to observe the total solar eclipse through Percy’s exquisite telescope. At the same time, 6,000 miles due east, Alexandra Uvarov was giving birth to her third son. Boris Petrovich Uvarov had the great good fortune of being born into a family that loved to spend time in the countryside, and of being born into a countryside with a remarkable diversity of grasshoppers, crickets, and katydids. Although the steppe surrounding his hometown was arid and uninviting, Uralsk lay along the Ural River—an oasis teeming with life just inside the border of modern-day Kazakhstan. The Uvarovs went on family outings, filling their horse-drawn wagon with tents, pots, fishing gear, and the family cat. Perhaps this affinity for nature was particularly important for his father, Petr, who worked as a state bank employee and could not have found much of the “tonic of wilderness” within the gray walls of a financial institution. The family spent weekends
camping and hiking, and it was not long before young Boris began collecting insects as a hobby. His drawers of meticulously prepared specimens yielded several prizes, and the teachers at the Agricultural School encouraged him with high praise.

At the age of fifteen, Uvarov began his higher education at the School of Mining in Ekaterinoslav but soon transferred to the University of St. Petersburg. Although this university later developed a premier program in entomology, in earlier days it did not provide an optimal setting for the study of insects. And so, Uvarov settled into a less conventional but decidedly effective “school” while attending the university. He discovered the wonders of the Russian Entomological Society, which held informal meetings every Monday and hosted the reading of scientific papers once a month. The budding scientist was entranced with the opportunity to mingle with the most eminent entomologists in all of Russia.

Through the society, Uvarov was allowed to visit the entomological section of the Zoological Museum in the Academy of Sciences, and he became infatuated with insect taxonomy as surely as a moth is drawn to a flame. In the midst of this love affair, a seminal book on the Orthoptera (the order of insects that includes the grasshoppers, locusts, crickets, and katydids) of the Russian Empire was published in St. Petersburg, and Uvarov’s passion became keenly focused. He wrote his diploma paper on the Orthoptera of his beloved homeland, the Uralsk province, basing the manuscript on the collections he had made during summer holidays. Little did he realize that this was the first step toward publishing nearly 500 scientific papers on various aspects of grasshoppers and locusts.

Upon his graduation, Uvarov’s life turned from the quiet and intense studies of a university student to the whirlwind of marriage and work. He was appointed as the entomologist to Murgab Crown Cotton Estate in Transcarpia, but a year later he returned to St. Petersburg to join the Department of Agriculture. Romance became a centerpiece of his life. The young scientist had the “white nights” of summer in Russia’s most cultured and elegant city to share with his wife, Anna. And he was seduced by opportunities to foster his intellectual passion through travel to the Northern Caucasus for his other great love—locusts.

At twenty-three, he became the first director of the Entomological Bureau at Stavropol, a hotbed of locust outbreaks northeast of the Black Sea. He worked on developing control methods for the Migratory and Moroccan locusts, two of the most devastating insects of Russian agriculture. It was here that Uvarov witnessed a bizarre and initially puzzling spectacle. During his fieldwork, he saw mixed populations of a benign grasshopper and a devastating locust—along with some odd intermediate forms. These observations would serve as the foundation for a theory that would revolutionize entomology, but the idea was so radical that he would not feel confident enough to develop and reveal it for nearly another ten years. While pondering this heretical notion he continued to advance in his career. Uvarov organized plant protection stations and labored to help farmers battle locusts, as their counterparts had done with the help of Riley a generation earlier on the steppes of North America.

Life in Russia deteriorated for Uvarov following Vladimir Lenin’s ascendancy to power. The young scientist had been educated during the reign of the czars, and intellectuals were highly suspect in the new Soviet order. In 1919, Uvarov was sent to Georgia, essentially exiled to a distant outpost. He became the Keeper of Entomology and Zoology in the State Museum of Georgia and reader at the State University in Tiflis, reasonably prestigious positions but rife with tension. As a Russian, he was treated poorly by his colleagues. Georgian nationalism was intense, and the people had little toleration for Russians on their soil. To make matters worse, the instability of the early years following the revolution made the new Soviet Union prone to political and military incursions. The same year that Uvarov arrived so did the British army, occupying Tiflis as part of the Allied Intervention that was intended to support Georgian autonomy while sustaining British access to the oil-rich Transcaucasus. The presence of foreign troops irritated the Soviets but proved a blessing to the Russian entomologist.