Season 1, Episode 5: Mormon Crickets vs Locusts, the swarming cousins of two continents.

Today’s episode starts with a very specific kind of desert memory: growing up in Northern Nevada, riding out in a jeep to hunt fossils, and accidentally driving straight into what I can only describe as a wall of bugs—Mormon crickets—so thick the tires went crunch, crunch, crunch and the road turned slick like summer ice from pure cricket sludge. That year sent me down a rabbit hole of insect crowd psychology: how these not-really-crickets (they’re katydids) can be basically invisible in the landscape… until density and conditions line up and they flip into a dark, marching, crop-devouring army that has the state literally plowing bug bodies off highways. And once you understand that switch—solitary to gregarious—you start seeing the same eerie logic in desert locust swarms across Africa and why “plague” isn’t just poetic language, and you also start appreciating how the Rocky Mountain locust could be a continent-scale disaster… right up until humans casually erased it. It’s a story about plants and pests, sure—but also about how environments, agriculture, and sheer numbers can turn a background species into a moving catastrophe, and how our attempts to control nature sometimes rewrite the rules entirely. Thank you to HD Studios for the Music.