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Isha Yiras Hashem's avatar

Thos was absolutely fascinating to me on so many levels!!

FYI by going to America, they meant literally the continent. My relatives landed in Columbia first. They did not at that point differentiate between the countries except that NY had some infrastructure.

Eleanor Konik's avatar

Interesting, thanks for the background!

Rose May's avatar

That was FASCINATING! I didn't know any of that about locusts, i always kinda accepted them like when they show up in The Little Prairie books, as a sort of divine-adjacent thing that happens sometimes. And now that you've explained it to me, i see why everyone was convinced it was a godly punishment, how could you even start to understand normal useless grasshoppers turning into this???

Eleanor Konik's avatar

Yeah before I started researching this I didn't really understand why "plague of locusts" was such a big deal. I figured it was up there with "rain of frogs" for just being a weird thing that happens sometimes. But no, locusts are awful.

Neural Foundry's avatar

Love the Liet-Kynes parallel, it's uncanny. The touch-triggered serotonin mechanism is wild, basically grasshoppers have a built-in crowd sensor that turns them into a totally diferent organism. The Nebraska swarm numbers are almost incomprehensible, 12 trillion insects. Makes sense that cyclical disasters like this shaped modern agricultural policy, nobody learns preventio until after the catastrophe hits.