Plague of locusts threatens Australian outback
By CHRISTOPHER ZINN
The Guardian
April 28, 2000
SYDNEY, Australia - A plague of locusts of biblical proportions, estimated at
100 billion-strong, is on the move through the Australian outback,
threatening everything in its path from valuable vineyards to laundry hanging
out to dry.
The infestation _ described as the worst in 20 years _ follows record rains
and the greening of normally arid expanses. A change of wind direction is
expected to blow it towards the food- and wine-growing area of the Riverina
in southern New South Wales.
Four airplanes and five helicopters are currently spraying vast areas trying
to arrest the migration.
"If it gets to the extreme, they tend to attack anything that's green,
including green clothes that are hanging on the clothesline," said Geoff File
of the New South Wales agriculture department. "They've been known to eat the
green out of clothes in a very severe plague, which we rarely get in
Australia these days. They can create enormous damage."
The Australian plague locust commission said there were massive swarms on
both sides of the continent. This was a particularly unusual event which has
seen Western Australia's wheat belt, the rangelands of Queensland, as well as
South Australia and New South Wales affected.
The eastern plague, which has already attacked cereal crops in South
Australia, is heading for the rich agricultural areas and could cause $150
million worth of damage, according to commission estimates.
"They tend to fly on the same night," said the locust commission's director,
Dr. Graeme Hamilton. "There are reports of locusts raining on rooftops at
three and four in the morning."
Rare and widespread flooding gave the locusts the damp soil they need to
hatch new eggs and produced a swathe of green shoots to satisfy their
insatiable appetites.
"We're spraying what we find. We're trying to do as much as we can as fast as
we can," said the commission's operations manager, Walter Spratt. "Because
conditions have been so good there have been multiple (egg) layings so there
are still quite a lot of juveniles out there."
Farmer Brett Eglinton has witnessed a number of small locust hatchings in the
past two months. "In the last few days they've started to fly and there are a
lot of them in the air," he said. "They don't block out the sun, but they're
very thick. We've got millions of them now so we'll have hundreds of millions
in the spring."
In New South Wales, the commission has identified 48 locust "targets" in the
western districts and is spraying with pesticide. But commission forecaster
Paul Wilson said the problem is spreading across the state, although the
winter will slow it down temporarily.
"We have been doing quite a bit of control ...," he said. "Basically, there
are locusts over a very, very wide area, and wherever those adults were seen
during the autumn, we can expect eggs to hatch in the next spring as well."
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service. For more Guardian news go to
http://www.guardian.co.uk/)
-
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