Insects injurious to staple crops / by E. Dwight Sanderson.

  • Ezra Dwight Sanderson
Date:
1902
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Insects injurious to staple crops / by E. Dwight Sanderson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    82/342 (page 66)
    G6 most value. The female beetle deposits from four to five hundred of her yellowish eggs in irregular masses in loose ground, and in about ten days there hatch from these eggs some “ very active, long-legged larvaj, with huge heads and strong jaws, which run about everywhere seeking the eggs of locusts.” Each of these larvfe will consume one of the masses or about thirty eggs. The subsequent life-history of these insects is very complicated on account of their peculiar habits, but the various stages are shown in Fig. 40. The Lesser Migratory Locust. Besides the Rocky Mountain Locust there is only one other species that truly possesses the habit of migrating, though to a far lesser extent, and which is therefore known as the Lesser Migratory Locust {Melmiophis atlantis Riley). It is considerably smaller than its western relative and somewhat resembles the Red-legged Locust both in size and appearance. The species of very widely dis- tributed, occurring from Florida to the Arctic Circle east of the Mississippi, and on the Pacific slope north of the 40th parallel to the Yukon. The habits and life-history of the species are in all essentials j^i’fi'Ctically the same as of the former species except that they have no particular breeding-grounds. Injuries by this grasshopper were first noticed in 1743, almost seventy-five years before the first record of the Rocky Mountain Locust, and since then they have done more or less serious damage in some part of the territory inhabited every few years. Non migratory Locusts. There are several species of locusts which, though lack- ing the migratory habit, and thus being more easily con- trolled, often become so numerous as to do serious damage