After months of building, the biggest locust swarm recorded in 70 years swept across 10 countries in East Africa in spring 2020.

The damage to crops was estimated at $8.5 billion (€8.1 billion) in a region where 23 million people face severe food insecurity.

During these invasions, desert locusts (Schistocerca gregaria) eat their own weight in food every day. The biblical-scale plague ate through 160,000,000 kilograms of food a day — enough to feed 800,000 people for a year.

Scientists have been trying to understand how individual locusts gather in swarms for decades. Knowing their behavior would help with predicting and managing outbreaks.

A new model, published today in the journal Science, casts light on the hive mind of locusts. The study describes how individual locusts transition from behaving as solitary animals to giant swarms with collective motion.

"Our work provides a new perspective for considering collective motion in animals, and robotics too," lead author Iain Couzin, a neurobiologist at Center of the Advanced Study of Collective Behavior, Konstanz, Germany.

"One application is a new class of predictive models of how and where swarms move. Future research on this could impact the livelihoods of 1 in 10 people on the planet," Couzin told DW.

© Deutsche Welle