The ‘end of the world’ moment when driving through locust swarms in the Sahara

On February 26, a video recorded by Salah Abdelhadi showed locusts covering the entire road, large flocks flying against the windshield, obscuring visibility. The road surface is almost covered with grasshoppers.

Abdelhadi said he was participating in a long-distance off-road vehicle race starting from Budapest (Hungary) and ending in Bamako (Mali). A male tourist recorded this scene near Boujdour – a coastal city in the Western Sahara region, on the Atlantic Ocean.

“We passed through several very thick swarms of locusts and by chance recorded the most terrible swarm,” Abdelhadi said.

Before that, sheets New York Post reported that large-scale locust swarms also appeared in the Canary Islands (Spain) – a famous resort destination in the Atlantic Ocean and were described as a “locust disaster”.

Accordingly, the islands of Lanzarote, Tenerife, Gran Canaria and Fuerteventura were flooded by short-horned locusts within a few days, after the pests originating from the Sahara desert were swept in by winds and mild, humid weather conditions.

Lanzarote was severely affected with the insects appearing in areas such as Arrecife, Costa Teguise, Famara, Uga and Tahíche. Videos circulating on social networks show the sky darkening with locusts, creating a scene like something out of a movie.

Although they do not pose a direct threat to humans, locust swarms can cause great damage to agriculture, especially vineyards, if they develop into a large-scale epidemic.

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), desert locusts are the most destructive migratory insects in the world. A herd of about 250 acres (more than 101 hectares), equivalent to 80 million individuals, can consume enough food to feed 35,000 people in a day.

The Canary Islands once suffered a serious locust epidemic. In 1958, desert locusts from Africa destroyed crops in Tenerife, forcing authorities to spray pesticides from the air, while people used fire, noise and toxic baits to cope. Four years earlier, another wave destroyed about 10,000 hectares of crops in the area.