The mystery of the locust plague

locusts.
the animal is
what's so scary about a grasshopper? What if someone told you that these little bugs that bounce through the grass can eat 35,000 people's rations a day? In fact, in many people's memory, locusts are synound for hunger, when the "locust plague" came, the apocalyptic scene is the "childhood shadow".
insects that look harmless to humans and animals suddenly become disasters? For thousands of years, people have been wondering, so they have to put it down to "natural disasters". But the Chinese Academy of sciences
the Institute of Zoology and Zoology researchers do not believe in this "evil." He led the team into the locust pile, after more than 20 years of research, finally found the mystery of locust swarms of disaster. The results of the Kang orchestra team were published in the August 12 issue of Nature.locust plague and drought, floods and the three major natural disasters in the history of our country have caused serious agricultural and economic losses.
locusts are the most widely distributed locusts in the world, according to china's nearly 2000 years of history records show that large-scale locust plague has occurred more than 800 times, is Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Australia's important agricultural pests.
desert locusts, although only found in Africa, the Middle East, southern Europe and South Asia, have been documented as harmful for more than 5,000 years, and these two locust disasters have long been considered one of the major human plagues.
" locusts are worldwide pests. According
, a researcher at the Institute of Animal Research, there is an average of one locust plague every five years, and some social events in history have been related to locust plagues. A locust plague in 1924, for example, even caused a train on the Nanjing Railway to run.
locust plague is not just in people's memories. As recently as 2019 to June 2020, desert locust outbreaks spread from the Horn of Africa to southern Iran and the India-Pakistan border to more than 20 countries and territories. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the desert locust plague affected more than 260,000 hectares of the region, a 25-year scale, 11.9 million people's food supply is directly threatened. Russia, North and South America have also been hit by local locusts in recent years, and just last year, the United States, which has had few locust plagues in its history, has also been hit.
is also the worst-hit area of locust plague. "Worldwide, locust plagues pose a major threat to agriculture, the economy and the environment. Although
plague has long been associated with the history of human development, human scientific understanding of the causes of locust plague is not in contrast. In 1921, Yuvalov, an internationally renowned entomologist and father of locusts, discovered that locusts were a disaster because they could change from low-density dwarves to high-density swarms, and it was not until the 1970s that international scientists realized that clusters of information were probably the most critical factor in locust aggregation.
decades later, scientists have not been able to find the key substance, and no compound seems to meet all the criteria for clustering of information.
the key evidence of secrecy? This has aroused great interest in resuming.Recently, the recreation team analyzed the body tables and fecal volatiles of swarm and diastopheric locusts and identified a scent specific to swarm locusts in 35 compounds, a compound that releases low but very high bioactive compounds 4-vinyl benzene ether (4VA).
researchers determined through a series of behavioral experiments that 4VA has a strong attraction to both group and lysody locusts, and that this attraction is gender-neutral.
" we found that 4VA, an informational cell released specifically by the community, is largely available in lyse locusts. But as long as four to five dwarvettes come together, the release of the pyride can start, indicating that it has a very low induction threshold. "We think that in the wild it may be a small gathering of locusts that can start releasing 4VA, and then recruit more locusts to join in, making the locust population larger and larger," he told China Science Daily. "
, can 4VA attract and gather locusts in its natural environment?" The researchers arranged the core containing 4VA in the field and found that 4VA was highly attractive to laboratory populations outdoors. Further, they will lure the core directly to the locust field occurrence area of Tianjin North Port, a wide range of block experiments once again proved that 4VA can not only attract wild populations, but also not affected by the natural environment locust background density.
This study for the first time from chemical analysis, behavioral verification, neuroelectrical records, olfactory receptor identification, gene knock-out and field verification and other aspects of the locust swarm information to carry out a comprehensive and full identification and verification, found and established 4VA is the swarm of fly locust polypics, and in the past reported that other compounds do not have all the conditions of cluster information, this research paradigm to improve the study of chemical ecology to a new stage.
Leslie Vosshall, a member of the American Academy of Sciences and a professor at Rockefeller University in the Us, one of the authors of the paper, said: "This work has made an exciting discovery, finding a long-sought locust swarm of pyrokin molecules. The article contains startling levels of research, and I give my unconditional support, and this outstanding work should not be delayed in any way and should be published in Nature as a matter of priority. ”。has long relied on large-scale spraying of chemical insecticides for the prevention and control of locust plagues. But the kang team's research not only revealed the mysteries of the locust swarm, but also made it possible for the locusts to be green and sustainable.
found that 4VA is a plant that comes from locusts, and synthetics are very easy and cheap, " he said. Using synthetic information to monitor locust population dynamics in the field for long periods of time to serve forecasting, to design and trap locusts and to eliminate them by concentrating chemical pesticides or biological agents in the trap zone, thereby significantly reducing the use of chemical pesticides, and to design antagonists based on the structure of 4VA to prevent locusts from aggregation, he said.
at the same time, researchers also found 4VA-specific receptors in hundreds of olfactory receptors in locusts, and when gene-editing techniques were used to knock them out, the locusts' response and attractiveness to 4VA were lost.
This suggests that the mutant moths can be cultured and released into the wild for a long time, so that an unstoponable population of locusts may be established in the hard-hit areas, maintaining a certain number of locusts in the wild and achieving sustainable control, combining environmental protection with pest control.
this article the first time I went online. Cheng Gong, a professor at Tsinghua University, commented, "This is an integrated study whose ideas are also very enlightening to those of us who work in other fields of entomology." Chen , a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and former director of the National Natural Science Foundation of China, remembers moving locusts from the wild back to the lab years ago. He realized in the 1990s that macrobiology and microbiology should be integrated to solve macroscience problems with technological advances in molecular biology. This important achievement is the result of the perseverance and long-term persistence of the resuming team. "
time, when people think of locusts again, they will think of different keywords.
doi: 10.1038/s41586-020-2610-4