LETHBRIDGE – What happened to the grasshoppers?
A plague of hoppers was set to rise from the earth this spring. Last fall, near-record numbers of grasshopper eggs were counted from Winnipeg to the British Columbia Peace country.
“This is the greatest, most precipitous drop in grasshopper populations in my 21 years (of research),” said Dan Johnson of the University of Lethbridge in southern Alberta.
“We were poised for a real wreck.”
Like everything else this year, the cool, wet weather has slowed them down.
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“It is about two weeks behind, and that is a lot in a short season.”
In the cold, the insects move and develop slowly, making them an easy target for predators and parasites.
Some tiny hatchlings fell prey to heavy, repeated rains that followed warm days. Such conditions prompted them “to pour from the ground” only to be drowned.
For those that survived, cool-weather, high-humidity diseases are expected to begin to take a toll on adults.
The good news is that the extra plant material in the fields may provide enough for farmer and hopper alike. But this may also create an egg inventory problem for next season.
“Even if only 10 percent survive, there will still be plenty eating and laying eggs for next year,” said Johnson who maintains a website that tracks the current season at http://people.uleth.ca/~dan.johnson/htm/update04.htm.
Johnson said individual farmer control efforts to prevent a population from egg laying “wouldn’t likely be cost effective because they tend to be a regional problem at this time of year.”
One thing known about the summer of 2005 is that the world’s leading researchers of orthopteroid insects – grasshoppers, locusts, katydids and crickets – will be in southern Alberta in large numbers.
Once every four years they meet and next August they will be in Canmore, Alta.
“And we might have something for them to see. It depends on the weather,” Johnson said.
