It was on a cool Tuesday afternoon that the residents of Sinanché, a small town in southeastern Mexico, first heard the hissing.

Looking out their windows, the leaves of the fruit trees in their back gardens had been licked clean, while chewed-on lemons, oranges and hoya covered the grass.

But not a single one of Sinanché’s some 3,100 residents had to look far for the culprit – or culprits, rather.

All they had to do was look up.

Miles-long clouds of locusts have been blanketing the skies above the state of Yucatán this week, flying through shopping plazas, smacking into the windows of apartment complexes and gobbling up anything green in local parks.

Social media users and the Mexican press both asked the same question: Is this a sign the world is coming to an end?

In Exodus, locusts were the eighth of 10 plagues sent to carpet Egypt.

One regional outlet even quoted the Book of Revelation 9:3, which reads: ‘And there came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth: and unto them was given power, as the scorpions of the earth have power.

‘And it was commanded them that they should not hurt the grass of the earth, neither any green thing, neither any tree; but only those men which have not the seal of God in their foreheads.’

Except these locusts certainly have certainly hurt any and every green thing in sight.

Farmers have said the blizzard of bugs has nibbled on their cornfields in the middle of harvest, though officials say the swarm will unlikely lead to any major losses to the agriculture sector.

Some farmers have tried to douse crops with pesticides in a bid to kill the insects.

With not enough vegetation to go around, the famished swarms have buzzed into urban areas to eat trees, bushes and flowers.

By nightfall, Sinanché’s locals told the Mexican newspaper Por Esto! the locusts had leapt away.

Mérida, the state capital about 30 miles southwest of Sinanché, however, has had no such luck.

Though Mérida hasn’t seen locust plagues for years, the city has now become overridden with thousands since Monday.

Paseo de Montejo, a major thoroughfare, the Tanlum, Hidalgo de Chuburná and Villas de Oriente neighbourhoods were particularly hard hit by the insects, the regional Mexican news outlet Posta reported.

State officials expect the locusts, which were blown in from the east, will leave the city ‘in a couple of days’ and hope they will land on more sparsely-populated land.

A monitoring and extermination plan has been activated in a bid to contain the locusts.

Locusts, jittery insects which belong to the same family as grasshoppers, are well known for their appetites.

Even a relatively modest one-square-kilometre locust swarm, about the size of a small park, can eat the same amount of food in a day as about 35,000 people and travel 100 miles.

Plagues of locusts have ravaged societies since the Pharaohs led ancient Egypt but the frequency and ferociousness of them has been on the up due to climate change and deforestation, researchers say.

This isn’t the first time dark fogs of locusts have besieged Yucatán.

In 2019, Mexican journalist Raúl Gutiérrez got straight to the point as the skies of 12 municipalities were darkened.

‘The apocalypse is near,’ he posted on X in January that year, ‘the plague is falling on Yucatán.’

But one Sinanché resident, José Dzul, knows that this year’s swarm likely won’t be the last time the skies will be blotted out by thousands of locusts.

‘Let’s hope they haven’t left their eggs,’ he told Por Esto!.

Source:
courtesy of METRO

by Josh Milton

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