Monday, Jan. 04, 1954
Just Us Girls
The desert locust (Schistocerca gregaria forsk) has made its name dread to generations of African and Middle Eastern farmers from Biblical times down to the recent destructive plague of locusts in Iran.
The locust's behavior is as unpredictable as the areas in which it appears. For years the Schistocerca lives a solitary, law-abiding life, the members of the clan thinly scattered over the countryside. Then, suddenly, what entomologists call the gregarious phase begins. The scattered insects somehow get together and converge in a huge, destroying swarm, leaving the land ruined wherever they pass.
Last week Dr. Andrew G. Hamilton, 46, head of the biological department at London's St. Thomas' Hospital Medical School, announced a long-suspected explanation of the desert locust's strange ways. The female desert locust, he discovered, is parthenogenetic, i.e., capable of producing offspring all by herself. In the last year, Hamilton has raised four generations of female Schistocerca in specially built hutches on the hospital roof. Regularly, his succeeding generations of females, without male help, have produced and laid their eggs deep in the sand of their hutches. All their offspring are female locusts, too.
Hamilton's locust parthenogeneticists proved themselves, in addition, sturdier and longer-lived than locusts born as the result of male interference, but they produce about one-third as many offspring. This explains the long periods when the desert locusts lead scattered and peaceable lives.
Then one day, in a manner as yet undiscovered, the conditions for reproduction and fertilization occur. Male desert locusts come on the scene, and the quiet females suddenly forsake their love of solitude. Side by side with their new consorts, they swell the deadly locust swarm, trapped in the toils of their own mob psychology.
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