Concern about a plague is growing in the Canary Islands, with officials on alert in the sunny Spanish holiday hotspots of Lanzarote, Tenerife, Gran Canaria and Fuerteventura
Lanzarote has been visited by locusts (Image: Getty Images)
The threat of a plague is growing in four Spanish holiday hotspots.
Lanzarote, Tenerife, Gran Canaria and Fuerteventura have seen clouds of locusts descend in recent days. While the short-horned grasshopper breed is not harmful to people, it could pose a threat to agriculture, including vineyards, if the situation escalates into a plague, as happened 20 years ago.
Videos have been posted on social networks showing hundreds of locusts flying around the countryside. The insects have arrived from the western Sahara due to recent wet but warm weather. The locusts have hit several parts of Lanzarote, including the popular tourist locations of Arrecife, Costa Teguise, Famara, Uga and Tahíche.
There have also been swarms on the other Canary Islands, including in the north of Tenerife. Twenty years ago, a plague of this insect affected Lanzarote, wreaking havoc on crops and people’s daily lives. At that time, the number of locusts was so large that teams of firefighters were called in to eliminate them.
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The locust is an insect that, over the centuries, has arrived from the African continent with the winds from the east, along with the suspended dust of the Sahara Desert.
According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO), it is the most destructive migratory pest in the world and, in response to environmental stimuli, it can form dense and highly mobile swarms.
They have the capacity to destroy crops by ingesting their weight in food each day. A swarm of one square kilometre can contain up to 80 million adults and has the capacity to consume the same amount of food per day as 35,000 people.
Lanzarote’s government has already mobilised its environmental services, which will be vigilant for the next 48 hours. Leaders are confident the swarms will not escalate into a plague.
“The next two days are going to be key. If they are adult specimens that have arrived exhausted, they will die and nothing will happen. If we see copulations, that would mean that they are reproducing. We would have to see it between this afternoon and tomorrow,” said the head of the Environment of the Cabildo, Francisco Fabelo.
“We already experienced this in 2004, and at the end of the eighties, there was another similar episode. On both occasions, it was very striking, with specimens all over the roads, but they did not cause damage inside.”
The Canary Islands experienced one of the most serious episodes of desert locust in October 1958, when large swarms from Africa devastated crops on the islands and, especially, in the south of Tenerife, in municipalities such as Arico, Fasnia, Granadilla de Abona and the Güímar Valley.
Tomato and potato plantations suffered significant damage and the plague forced the mobilisation of planes from the Ministry of Agriculture to fumigate from the air, while residents and farmers tried to combat the insects from the ground with rudimentary methods such as bonfires, noise or poisoned baits.
A similar episode had already occurred in 1954, when another swarm devastated more than 10,000 hectares of crops on the islands. Agricultural leaders on the islands say they do not fear another repeat and have stressed the islands have the means to combat the problem.