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In May of 2018, something weird happened over the Arabian Peninsula.
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A large cyclone passed over the Rub' al Khali desert -
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A massive stretch of unbroken sand also called “the empty quarter.”
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It usually looks like this.
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But after the cyclone, it looked like this.
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Lakes had formed between the dunes.
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The desert was filled with water for the first time in twenty years.
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Then, 5 months later, it happened again.
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Another cyclone hit.
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Over the next year, powerful cyclones kept coming out of the Arabian sea, at a frequency not seen in decades.
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It caused catastrophic flooding in normally dry areas across the region.
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But especially here, in East Africa.
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Today, the flood waters have receded,
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but they left behind a different type of disaster:
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"Millions of locusts..."
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"A plague of biblical proportions."
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"The worst in 70 years."
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"Their impact, devastating."
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"...unprecedented threat to food security."
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"There's no end in sight."
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This is a desert locust.
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It's a type of grasshopper that lives across this area,
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from Northwest Africa to Western Asia.
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Typically, desert locusts spend most of their time alone, in what's called their “solitary” phase.
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They really only meet with others to mate.
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But if the weather starts to shift – that can lead to a transformation.
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If a normally dry area becomes unusually lush with vegetation,
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as it would after heavy rains,
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these insects will start to congregate.
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That sudden crowding triggers a hormone – and the locust starts to change, both physically and mentally.
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It starts with a color shift, from a muddled brown color, to a bright yellow.
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Its body shrinks and its endurance increases, which optimizes it for flight.
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Its brain grows, and so does its appetite.
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This is called the “gregarious phase."
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They eat, and breed – leaving their eggs in the damp soil.
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When they hatch, they form what are called “hopper bands”:
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swarms of tens of thousands of non-flying but voracious insects that move together as a unit.
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Eventually, they develop wings.
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And once they take flight, it's almost impossible to stop them.
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Locust swarms ride the wind, which allows them to travel up to 150 km a day.
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A single swarm can contain up to 150 million insects per square kilometer.
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Each one consumes its body weight in vegetation daily.
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In 24 hours, a swarm of that size eats more food than 35,000 people.
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Since late 2019, East Africa has been experiencing its worst locust outbreak in decades.
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In 2020, the area has seen swarms as large as 2,400 square kilometers.
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That's a swarm of insects over 3 times the size of New York City,
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capable of eating as much food as tens of millions of people.
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The swarms of bugs are so thick that airplanes have been forced to divert their course.
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Billions of ravenous insects sweep through areas, decimating acres of farmland,
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and threatening already food-scarce regions with famine.
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"There's nothing left to harvest. There's nothing else that I know how to do."
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And they're spreading. In February, Pakistan declared a state of emergency.
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By late May, the swarms had reached parts of Northern India for the first time since 1962.
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And the biggest factor in all of this is the weather.
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Locusts reproduce exponentially when the weather is in their favor.
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With every new generation, the population increases 20-fold.
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So if a normally dry area stays wet for a long time,
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the population will explode.
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And that's what researchers think happened, starting with the 2018 cyclone.
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The unusual amount of rain led to an unusual amount of vegetation,
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which led to an unusual number of new locusts.
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Swarms formed here, in the unusually wet desert, and made their way into surrounding areas,
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including East Africa, which itself had just experienced historic flooding in late 2019,
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from heavy rains caused by an unusually warm Indian Ocean.
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A single “perfect storm” isn't enough to bring in swarms of locusts of this size.
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It takes a series of them;
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something that used to be really rare in this area.
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But unfortunately, extreme weather that used to be really rare suddenly becoming more common
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is one of the hallmarks of climate change.
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That could mean a future with more cyclones in the desert,
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more greenery where there once was sand,
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and more breeding grounds for locusts.
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Do you ever notice these weirdly specific targeted ads when browsing the internet?
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It's a little creepy when they even pinpoint where you live.
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That's because one of the ways advertisers target you is through your IP address.
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See, each of your devices has its own unique number.
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So while your internet may be password protected,
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your IP address is available for advertisers to look at
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and that is how they find your location.
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ExpressVPN is a tool that masks your IP address.
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They let you select from over 90 different countries to reroute your connection through,
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so it makes it seem like all your web activity
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is coming from a different IP address somewhere else in the world.
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One click not only encrypts your data but lets you browse the web anonymously.
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ExpressVPN does not affect our editorial, but their support does make videos like this one possible.
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