🎓 How Locusts Cause Famines and Shaped the Middle East

When there are too many grasshoppers, people starve. A look at Palestinian, Nebraskan, and East African locust swarms.

I’ve been interested in locusts for a while — they show up in my notes on everything from biblical plagues to agricultural economics. But when I picked up Scott Anderson’s Lawrence in Arabia, I didn’t expect the locust material to be the most compelling part for me. Honestly, I ended up finding Lawrence himself kind of insufferable. The other guys are much cooler. The one I'm going to focus on today is Aaron Aaronsohn, a Zionist agronomist who ended up in Ottoman service when locusts started devouring Palestine.

Honestly, at first I sat up and took notice mostly because he reminded me of Liet-Kynes from Dune. But the challenges he had to overcome were frankly more difficult (and more interesting) than the Imperial Planetologist’s. Yeah, he had to figure out how to grow food in the desert and make it livable, but he also had to deal with locust plagues — which are a lot harder to cope with and avoid than sandworms. And coordinating with the British was a lot harder than the Fremen independence plan.

How Locusts Work

So, locusts aren’t their own species or whatever, it’s more like a phase stage of the grasshopper lifecycle that only happens sometimes. This is one of the reasons that sandworms are easier to deal with than locusts — sandworms are pretty much always around, so you get used to them. With decades between locust swarms it can be hard to really adapt your habits in a way that prevents the next crisis. It’s a long-term boom and bust cycle. I think of it as being sort of similar to how most people don’t plan for the stock market to crash, or a government to go off the rails. Those tend to be generational crises, and it’s difficult to leave opportunities on the table being paranoid about a generational crisis… like locusts swarms. Devastating locust swarms are pretty rare, it's not like a weevil infestation or whatever.

In the words of my two-year-old: but why?

Well, as Colin Munro explained in this great article featuring photos he took himself (always a plus!), certain grasshopper species can transform from solitary, harmless creatures into swarming, crop-devouring plagues. The technical term is “phenotypic plasticity” — the genes don’t change, but behavior and physiology shift dramatically in response to the environment. You see this a lot when you look at how an octopus responds to different water temperatures. But I digress.

For locusts the trigger is touch. When grasshoppers get crowded together — usually because drought has concentrated them around shrinking food sources — physical contact triggers serotonin production. The same neurotransmitter associated with mood in humans flips a switch in grasshoppers, and suddenly they want to be around other grasshoppers. They change color, breed faster, and start traveling together.

This adaptation probably evolved around 8 million years ago, as North Africa shifted from tropical forest to desert. Locusts that could switch between solitary and swarming modes could opt for settling down when food was plentiful, then mobbing up and migrating when it wasn’t.

This sucks for agricultural humans, though.

Locusts preferentially eat grasses and grains — exactly the crops that agricultural societies depend on for the bulk of their calories. Hunter-gatherers and mixed-subsistence communities fare better because their food sources are more varied. Tubers (like the amazing potato, star of The Martian by Andy Weir) stay underground where they’re safe, and locusts mostly ignore fruits and nuts.

But a society that depends on grass and grain is screwed, even if they’re pastoralists who mostly get their food from herding. The cows and sheep need to eat something, and they can’t get to it before the locusts do.

In the Middle East

The locusts of Exodus were the eighth plague, arriving after the frogs and flies and livestock disease but before darkness and death:

The locusts came up over all the land of Egypt and settled on the whole country of Egypt, such a dense swarm of locusts as had never been before, nor ever will be again. They covered the face of the whole land, so that the land was darkened, and they ate all the plants in the land and all the fruit of the trees that the hail had left. Not a green thing remained, neither tree nor plant of the field, through all the land of Egypt.

The Book of Joel treats locusts as instruments of divine judgment:

What the cutting locust left, the swarming locust has eaten. What the swarming locust left, the hopping locust has eaten, and what the hopping locust left, the destroying locust has eaten.

Given the biblical references, it makes sense that locusts show up in places like Palestine, the Levant, Israel, and whatever else you want to call that chunk of land along the eastern Mediterranean.

So let’s get back to Aaronsohn, the real-life Liet-Kynes, and the locusts he ended up tasked with defeating in Palestine.

Aaron Aaronsohn was the agronomist who discovered wild emmer wheat — the genetic ancestor of modern wheat — in 1906. (I wrote about wheat domestication in my review of Tamed by Alice Roberts if you want more on how we got from wild grasses to bread.) He also helped establish modern-day Israel.

He was born in 1876 in a small Romanian town, the son of a Jewish grain merchant. After Romania’s independence from the Ottomans, Jews were effectively blocked from citizenship, schools, and most professions. When Aaronsohn was six, his family joined a mass Jewish exodus. Instead of going to America¹, they sailed for Ottoman Palestine and settled with ~250 other Romanian Jews on barren land near Haifa, naming it Samarin. The land was terrible, and most of them were merchants with almost no farming skills; within a year they were so poor they had to pawn their Torah scrolls.

The early Zionist agricultural colonies in that area were effectively run under a baronial, almost serf‑like system financed by Baron Edmond de Rothschild. Settlers worked Rothschild’s land under his agents, in a tight, paternalistic, “feudalistic” regime.

For Aaronsohn personally though, this system worked out: at sixteen he was picked by Rothschild’s agents and sent to France to study agronomy and botany at the elite Grignon Institute, all expenses paid. On his return, he was supposed to be a kind of educated overseer/technician for Rothschild’s estates—the baron’s agricultural “man” rather than a free farmer.

But Aaronsohn was a Zionist visionary who believed his agricultural expertise could make a Jewish homeland in Palestine possible, and he poured a ton of effort into that instead. He ended up as known across the Middle East as the leading agronomist, was head of a sophisticated experimental farm at Athlit, and ended up well‑connected with Ottoman officials (from years of lobbying and advising). Anderson puts it thusly:

It was Aaronsohn, with his encyclopedic knowledge of the region’s flora and soil conditions and aquifers, who first appreciated how it might practically be accomplished, how the Jewish diaspora might return to its ancestral homeland and prosper by making the desert bloom.

Huge Liet-Kynes vibes.

The war complicated his plan, of course. And though I don’t know much about the Ottoman front (my semi-detailed knowledge of Ottoman history ends roughly when Roxelana died), I do know that they controlled the area around Jerusalem — which ends up being part of why the fall of the Ottomans led to the creation of modern-day Israel in all its complicated glory. But before that quagmire, in 1915, the locust swarms, so vast they blocked out the sun, descended on Jerusalem, stripping every green thing from the land and blinding farm animals who couldn’t close their eyes fast enough. It happened at a pretty rough moment — the middle of WWI, with tens of thousands of Syrian farmers conscripted, animals and equipment requisitioned, and ethnic tensions cranked up to the max.

And from March through October, locust swarms kept coming. Some were measured at a mile wide and seven miles long.

So Aaronsohn approached the Ottoman military governor of Syria, Djemal Pasha, with a plan. Their first meeting was tense: Aaron used the occasion not just to recommend modern anti‑locust techniques but to lecture Djemal about the army’s brutal requisitions and the ruin they’d caused. Djemal cut him off with: “What if I were to have you hanged?”

In a clever retort, alluding to both his considerable girth and to his network of influential friends abroad, the agronomist replied, “Your Excellency, the weight of my body would break the gallows with a noise loud enough to be heard in America.”

In the end, Djemal appointed Aaronsohn as High Commissioner of the Central Commission to Fight the Locusts tho.

The position came with extraordinary powers. All males between fifteen and sixty were required to collect and turn in twenty kilograms of locust eggs. Aaronsohn and his (Jewish, which complicated things given their social status at the time) team were given permission to move freely throughout the region, making detailed maps of the areas they surveyed.

But in addition to the flagrant discrimination, they had to deal with indifference and sabotage from Ottoman bureaucrats and army officers, as well as religious fatalism in Arab villages, where locusts were called djesh Allah—“God’s army”—and resistance was seen as pointless at best, impious at worst.

The swarms continued through 1916, and according to historian Zachary Foster’s research, the attack destroyed 60-100% of summer and autumn harvests depending on the crop, plus 10-15% of the winter wheat and barley. Between 100,000 and 200,000 people died of starvation or starvation-related diseases in the year after the locust attack alone. By 1918, the death toll in Greater Syria reached an estimated 500,000 — a comparatively brutal civilian casualty rate.

Mount Lebanon was hit worst. The Great Famine of Mount Lebanon took “an estimated 200,000 lives, a third of the region’s population, forcing another third to emigrate.” It wasn’t just the locusts, of course. Like I’ve said before, famines are rarely about just one thing. The Allied naval blockade didn’t help, the Ottoman requisitioning of food sucked when combined with the locust devastation, and Djemal Pasha deliberately prevented grain shipments from reaching the region (which is like the third time I’ve heard of this sort of thing leading to famine). But the locusts are what I’m focused on today.

The locust campaign made Aaronsohn realize that even in an existential food crisis, bureaucrats remained lazy, predatory, and sectarian. While he had once been a “staunch supporter of the Turks,” he ended up doubting that Jews could safely survive under Ottoman rule at all.

So along with figuring out how to deal with the locusts (his team was able to prevent a second locust spawn, and yes that’s totally a thing… see below), Aaronsohn’s people mapped Ottoman troop concentrations, fortifications, rail lines, and water sources. The anti-locust campaign became the foundation for NILI, the spy ring that would later pass critical intelligence to the British. I’m not an expert on Israeli history and didn’t finish the book, but I suspect this contributed a lot to the British backing the creation of modern-day Israel.

In America

North America had locust swarms too. Robert Francis documented how one swarm that hit Nebraska in 1874 covered 198,000 square miles and contained an estimated 12 trillion insects — the greatest concentration of animals ever recorded, according to Wikipedia by way of the Guinness World Records.

The Nebraska State Historical Society says the locusts devoured entire fields of wheat, corn, potatoes, and fruit. They also gnawed on curtains, clothing hung out to dry, wooden tool handles (attracted by the salt from sweat), and leather saddles and harnesses. Residents described swarms so thick they blocked the sun for six hours at a stretch. The Biblical “blocked out the sun” levels of plague swarm is probably not hyperbole, although I think I heard that phrase first in the context of arrows in the (genuinely not great, seriously that oracle scene was uncomfortable) movie 300.

The Rocky Mountain locust caused $200 million in damage to western agriculture in the 1870s — over $100 billion in today’s money. Army officials warned that 10,000 Nebraskans faced starvation. The federal relief effort that followed, organized by the Nebraska Relief and Aid Association, was one of the early examples of government agricultural assistance — historian Steven Kinsella argues these plagues started the relationship between agricultural producers and government that continues today. Nebraska even passed a law requiring all males between 16 and 60 to spend at least two days fighting locusts during hatching season, with a $10 fine for refusal.

Since America wasn’t in the middle of an existential war and the government did the opposite of blocking aid from reaching the area, things turned out a lot better than in Israel. It also helps that we spent a lot of time and effort converting prairie grassland (with bison, fires, and beavers doing their thing in places critical to the locusts’ lifecycle) into cropland. Basically they got less and less common over time. The last specimen was collected in 1902, and the IUCN formally declared the species extinct in 2014.

It’s not all good, I guess. The Eskimo curlew, a shorebird that may have depended on locusts as a food source during its spring migration, went from abundant to critically endangered around the same time — last seen in 1939.

East Africa, 2020

It’s not like locusts are done making headlines, though.

Jamal Osman wrote about the 2020 locust crisis in East Africa, which was the worst in decades. Ethiopia, Kenya, and Somalia were hit hardest, with swarms threatening the food supply for tens of millions of people.

Back in 2018, two cyclones hit the Arabian Peninsula. Then there was heavy rainfall. The moisture enabled three generations of successful locust breeding in just nine months, increasing their numbers roughly 8,000-fold.

The response was complicated by COVID-19 lockdowns, supply chain disruptions, and coordination challenges across multiple countries. There’s also the pesticide paradox — spraying can reduce locust populations, but it makes surviving locusts unsafe to eat, eliminating one traditional coping mechanism for locust swarms. And humans weren’t the only ones who switched to eating locusts when the locusts ate everything else, so other alternate sources of food died — like the Eskimo curlews I mentioned above, although for different reasons.

Also, as with 1915 Israel, this happened in a region already stressed by conflict, drought, and displacement. I’ll say it again: locusts don’t cause wars or famines by themselves. It’s rarely about one thing. Locusts are just one of those little pinpricks that can push a precarious situation over the edge.

Like that time a big ole ship crashed into the Key Bridge. We know which little technical failure was the “real” reason it happened, but fundamentally the ship failed because of a million other maintenance failures — remember how I hammered that in my piece about infrastructure fragility that focused on canals and bridges? Locust plagues don’t really bother America (even though we totally do have locust-swarm-forming grasshopper breeds still) because we have better management. The closest thing we get is cicadas, which are mostly just neat — Laura Erickson has a great piece on how the 2024 double-brood emergence was the first since 1803. The biggest problem from that was people freaking out and pouring insecticide on everything, which killed some birds and other wildlife.

Florian U. Jehn’s work on famine and societal collapse goes a bit beyond the stuff I’ve written about. His point is that once you’re in a famine, it tends to reinforce itself — the conditions that caused the crisis make recovery harder. Locusts are one of many ways to arrive at that tipping point.

I wonder how Liet-Kynes would have dealt with such a swarm.

Further Reading

• The Library of Congress has a small exhibit on the 1915 locust plague with photographs from the American Colony in Jerusalem — the images of soldiers collecting eggs and swarms darkening the sky really put some of those biblical passages into context.

• Tablet Magazine’s piece on the Jerusalem plague has more detail on the spy ring and the ultimate fate of Aaronsohn and his wife.

1. A fun what-if historical fiction scenario I’ve never seen explored is “what if Aaron Aaronsohn and his family fled to America instead of Palestine?” What’s your take?