Apocalyptic locust swarm stops traffic as sky turns black in terrifying footage
This horrifying video shows the sky turning black as a swarm of locusts descends on Bahrain today.
In the clip, filmed by stunned witnesses cowering in their car, a dark cloud of flying insects swarms above a road in the normally-sunny Middle Eastern island nation.
As if sharing a single mind, thousands of bugs are all heading in the same direction – to gorge on any plants in their path.
The apocalyptic scene results in people stopping their cars, either too scared to drive with such poor visibility or to marvel at the unsettling spectacle.
Plague of locusts threatens East African economies as UN sounds alarm
- In recent days, locust swarms have begun to impact South Sudan, Uganda and Tanzania, having already decimated crops throughout Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia, Eritrea and Djibouti.
- Moody’s said the infestation will “test existing food storage in fragile Horn of Africa countries and add to inflationary pressures given the relatively high proportion of food in the consumer price index basket.”
- Desert locusts can travel up to 150km (95 miles) a day, and a one-square-kilometer swarm can devour as much food as 35,000 people in a single day, according to the UN.
Uganda army fights voracious desert locusts
Otuke (Uganda) (AFP) – Under a warm morning sun scores of weary soldiers stare as millions of yellow locusts rise into the northern Ugandan sky, despite hours spent spraying vegetation with chemicals in an attempt to kill them.
From the tops of shea trees, fields of pea plants and tall grass savanna, the insects rise in a hypnotic murmuration, disappearing quickly to wreak devastation elsewhere.
The soldiers and agricultural officers will now have to hunt the elusive fast-moving swarms — a sign of the challenge facing nine east African countries now battling huge swarms of hungry desert locusts.
They arrived in conflict-torn South Sudan this week, with concerns already high of a humanitarian crisis in a region where 12 million are going hungry, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
“One swarm of 40 to 80 million can consume food” for over 35,000 people in a day, Priya Gujadhur, a senior FAO official in Uganda, told AFP.