The Transatlantic Locust Plague
Witness History
BBC
4.5 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 18 September 2017
⏱️ 10 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A plague of African desert locusts flew 5,000 kilometres non-stop to the Caribbean in 1988 in a journey never before recorded. They are thought to have come over with Hurricane Joan and the islanders were horrified at the sight of millions of dead and dying locusts on the beaches. Ministries of Agriculture feared the insects would become an established pest and would ruin crops but the surviving locusts seemed disorientated and soon died out. Claire Bowes has been speaking to an entomologist from St Lucia about the strange visitors who didn't like bananas.
Photo: Getty Creative Images
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know. |
| 0:04.7 | My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds. |
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| 1:05.4 | Hello and thank you for downloading this witness history podcast from the BBC World |
| 1:10.6 | Service with me Claire Bowes. |
| 1:12.4 | History as told by the people who were there. |
| 1:15.2 | Or in this case this week history as told to you by the animals who were there? Well not |
| 1:21.7 | exactly but this week we are taking a look at some extraordinary events from history involving animals. |
| 1:28.0 | And today we go back to 1988 when a swarm of locus flew across the Atlantic from Africa to the Caribbean for the first time in living memory. |
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