Sunday, August 10, 2008
INSECT SWARMS—PLAGUE OR BLESSING?
When we examine nature we have a tendency to be impulsive in our judgments. Seeing a carnivore kill its prey can be a disturbing experience. Writers and film makers tend to anthropomorphize everything animals do or that happens to them. What that means is that we make the animals into humans and interpret their experiences in human terms. Many of us talk to our dogs and cats in ways that would lead an unseeing observer to assume that it was our child we were addressing. We frequently miss the logic or purpose behind something when we do this, and sometimes we blame God for an incident we view as a catastrophe that may not in fact be a disaster at all.
Recently anthropological and archaeological studies show that insect swarms may fall into this category. I can recall seeing movies at school of insect swarms destroying a crop and ravaging the resources of a community. It was repulsive to see millions of grasshoppers covering the ground and filling the air, destroying every green thing in their path. Certainly this was a disaster for the families victimized by the swarms of insects. To a great extent, however, the problem was one of man’s refusal to use a food resource readily available to him from early times.
The Ute and Paiute Indians were studied by John Wesley Powell who reported in the 1870s that the Indians had numerous ways of turning the insects into very great delicacies. Digs in Utah have shown heavy usage of grasshoppers as a source of food, and experiments with present day populations indicate that one person can collect 200 pounds of dried hopper per hour from lake beaches where they are piled up by wave action.
The question of food value still remains. An ordinary grasshopper is 60% protein, 11% carbohydrate, and 2% fat. The caloric value of grasshoppers is 1365 calories per pound compared with 1240 for beef and 1590 for wheat flour. This translates into 273,000 calories per hour of work invested compared with 300 to 1,000 calories per hour for seed collecting and 25,000 calories per hour for big game such as deer or antelope. One person collecting the insects for one hour would have the calorie content of 87 chili dogs, 49 slices of pizza, or 43 Big Macs.
It is not the purpose of this article to try to run the quick food places out of business, because like most Americans I do not find grasshopper eating to be high on my list of gourmet treats. On the other hand one has to see the wisdom of the old saying, “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.” Perhaps using the grasshoppers as a food source made their destructive capabilities so negligible to our ancestors that the swarms became a blessing instead of a plague. —Ref: Natural History, July 1989, pp. 22-25.
—John Clayton, Dandy Designs, Sept/Oct 1990
Cora Gail Trent
www.cgtrent.com
cgtrent@att.net
