Locusts herald return of Jesus

waltky · Mar 4, 2013

Granny says, "Dat's right - it's the end times - Jesus `bout to come back...

Israel on alert as locusts cross in from Egypt
Mar 4,`13 -- A swarm of locusts crossed into Israel from neighboring Egypt Monday, raising fears that Israel could be hit with a biblical plague ahead of the Passover holiday.

Israel sent out planes to spray pesticides over agricultural fields to prevent damage by the small swarm, which numbers about 2,000 locusts, said Dafna Yurista, a spokeswoman for the Agriculture Ministry. The ministry also set up an emergency hotline and asked Israelis to be vigilant in reporting locust sightings. The locust alert comes ahead of the weeklong Passover festival, which recounts the biblical story of the Israelite exodus from Egypt. According to the Bible, a huge swarm of locusts was the eighth of 10 plagues God imposed on Egyptians to persuade Pharoah to free the ancient Hebrews from slavery. Pharaoh did not agree to let them go until after the 10th plague, the death of the first born in every Egyptian family. This year Passover begins March 25.

Locusts can have a devastating effect on agriculture by quickly stripping crops. Farmers told Israeli media they were worried about a potential onslaught. "(The locusts) may not have ruined Pharaoh, but they could ruin us," Tzachi Rimon, a farmer, told Israel's Channel 10 TV. Yurista said the number of locusts was relatively small, but "just because they aren't many doesn't mean we are ignoring them."

Locusts are known to move with the wind, and the swarm was swept eastwards from Egypt, said Amir Ayali, who heads Tel Aviv University's zoology department, on Channel 10 TV. The last time Israel experienced a major locust outbreak was in 2004. Egypt's state news agency MENA said more than 17,000 locusts were exterminated in an area spanning more than 84,000 acres. No significant economic losses were reported, as the locusts were not mature enough to cause damage and did not remain long in the area to feed. Other affected areas were mostly desert.

Source
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waltky · Mar 21, 2013

Granny inna kitchen fixin' Uncle Ferd some pan-fried locusts he caught dis afternoon fer supper...

Eating locusts: The crunchy, kosher snack taking Israel by swarm
20 March 2013 - Israel is in the grip of a locust invasion. Farmers are seeing their crops gobbled up in minutes - and some people are taking a novel approach to pest control. Eating them.

Rabbi Ari Zivotofsky's children have been busy in the kitchen. On the menu breaded locust, and chocolate-covered locust. Mmmmmm. Israel is dealing with a locust emergency. For the last two weeks, the skies in the south have been swathed in a moving carpet of the swarming insects. Locusts eat their bodyweight in food every day. And they have been chomping their way through fields of potato and maize. They are showing little sign of letting up. And a few, like Zivotofsky's unlucky locusts, are now landing up in heavily populated areas, like Tel Aviv. Call it revenge, or just a practical killing of two birds with one stone - whatever the motivation, many Israelis have decided to cook them up, and eat them.

Locust is the only insect which is considered kosher. Specific extracts in the Torah state that four types of desert locust - the red, the yellow, the spotted grey, and the white - can be eaten. As with fish, there are no rules surrounding their ritual slaughter, making them a particularly versatile ingredient for culinary connoisseurs, like chef Moshe Basson, founder and owner of the famous Eucalyptus restaurant in Jerusalem, and a specialist in reviving ancient Biblical foods. For the uninitiated, he recommends serving them crunchy - an effect that is best achieved as follows: Drop them into a boiling broth, clean them off, and roll in a mixture of flour, coriander seeds, garlic and chilli powder. Then deep-fry them.

Pan-frying is another good option, and they are "crunchy, tasty and sweet", says Basson, when mixed with caramel and sprinkled into meringue. "There is a big interest. People will pay a fortune. They say 'Let us know when you are doing them.'" Locusts are usually hard to source in Israel and Basson has to get them from a specialist lab. But nothing, he says, beats freshly gathered, locally sourced, wild ones. Locusts that have feasted on sesame plants acquire an oily, shiny tinge, and are said to be particularly delicious. So what do they taste like?

More http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21847517
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Margot · Mar 22, 2013

waltky said: ↑

Granny inna kitchen fixin' Uncle Ferd some pan-fried locusts he caught dis afternoon fer supper...

Eating locusts: The crunchy, kosher snack taking Israel by swarm
20 March 2013 - Israel is in the grip of a locust invasion. Farmers are seeing their crops gobbled up in minutes - and some people are taking a novel approach to pest control. Eating them.
Click to expand...

I saw several locust invasions in Arabia in the 1950s and 1960s.. You could see them coming from a distance like a huge black cloud.

waltky · Mar 28, 2013

Granny says, "Dat's right - Jesus comin' back soon, dem Jews better get with the program...

Bible comes to life as locusts swarm Israel
March 27, 2013 - Israeli Jews celebrating Passover will easily relate to their ancestors this year the country has been swarmed by millions of locusts, one of the 10 plagues visited on the Egyptians.

Locusts have descended on Israel this week, just in time for Passover. As millions of Jews commemorate the story of the children of Israels exodus from Egypt, including the 10 plagues that afflicted Pharaoh and his people, millions of the crunchy buggers are creeping all over Israels southern deserts. This is nothing like the eighth plague of biblical times, in which locusts covered the whole face of the earth in a kind of collective punishment for the Egyptians whose leader refused to let his Hebrew slaves go free.

Locusts make their way from Egypt just before they land in Kerem Shalom near the border with Egypt, in southern Israel's Negev Desert, March 11.

But this year is the first time since 2005 that modern-day Israel has had to combat locusts, which can swarm so thickly that drivers cant see beyond their windshield. Potato farmers bemoaned the detrimental effect of a previous wave of the grasshopper-like insects several weeks ago. The Israeli Ministry of Agriculture, which was on locust alert, has responded quickly to the latest wave with pesticides. But its not just Israel. Today the Palestinian Authoritys Ministry of Agriculture sprayed pesticides in Hebron, in the southern West Bank. And Egyptian farmers have suffered millions of dollars in damage after a swarm of about 30 million locusts hit Cairo earlier this month.

The most serious situation, however, appears to be in Sudan, where the United Nations Food & Agricultural Organization (FAO) head has warned that immature hoppers are lining up along a 1,000-kilometer (621-mile) stretch of the Nile and could pose a serious threat to Nile Valley crops in May. OK, so locusts are not your average grasshopper. But still, how can they cause such massive damage? Consider these arresting facts: They can eat their weight in crops every day; They can fly more than 80 miles a day in swarms as dense as 200 million per square mile; And females can lay as many as 1,000 egg pods in roughly 10 square feet, according to a FAO fact sheet.

A locust hangs on a tree near Ashelim in the Negev Desert, southern Israel, March 11.

To put the threat in practical terms, 1 ton of locusts (just a fraction of your average swarm) can eat about as much food as 2,500 people can in a single day, says FAO. The Israelis have sought to reverse the food chain this Passover, however, by grilling the kosher insects for a crunchy, high-protein delicacy. And theyre not alone. Locust recipes abound. A Mexican version from Man Eating Bugs: The Art and Science of Eating Insects, by Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio calls for roasting locust torsos and sprinkling them on homemade guacamole in a taco shell. Scrap that. Sprinkle and enjoy, the cookbook says. Btayavon, as the Israelis would say. Bon appetit.

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Global-News/2013/0327/Bible-comes-to-life-as-locusts-swarm-Israel
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reedak · Mar 28, 2013

waltky said: ↑

Granny says, "Dat's right - Jesus comin' back soon, dem Jews better get with the program...

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Grandpa says, "Dat's right - Jesus comin' back in my dream, saying: 'ME? Locust? Scandalous!'...

Colonel K · Mar 28, 2013

Madagascar (The place those cartoon animals escaped to from New York Zoo) is suffering the worst locust plague for 60 years...

http://www.upi.com/Science_News/2013/03/28/Plague-of-locusts-hits-Madagascar/UPI-65731364506014/

Toefoot · Mar 28, 2013

Seems like your history and God is putting the Country in check?

Colonel K said: ↑

Madagascar (The place those cartoon animals escaped to from New York Zoo) is suffering the worst locust plague for 60 years...

http://www.upi.com/Science_News/2013/03/28/Plague-of-locusts-hits-Madagascar/UPI-65731364506014/
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waltky · May 24, 2013

Granny says, "Dat's right - it's a sign o' the end times like it says inna Bible, Jesus comin' back purt soon an' dem lefty lib'rals gonna get left behind...

Locust Plagues Point To Grim Future Of Climate Change
Thursday 23 May 2013 - Climatic changes in China, the Middle East and Africa could see more severe outbreaks of locusts devastating food crops

The desert locust, the most notorious of about a dozen locust species for its ability to rapidly multiply and travel long distances, threatens an area of 32 million square kilometres, stretching across 50 countries from west Africa to India. The fearsome insect has been farmers' foe since the earliest days of agriculture. When solitary, locusts are harmless. But when they congregate into groups they transform in behaviour and even appearance into killer vegetarians. In turn, swarms can be as large as several hundred square kilometres, of which a single square kilometre can comprise at least 40 million bugs, at times even double that.

In the immature adult phase, a locust can consume its own weight about two grams in vegetation per day, according to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). One tonne of desert locusts ("a very small part of an average swarm", according to FAO's website) could guzzle in a single day an amount of food equivalent to that consumed by 2,500 people. Locust plagues could therefore seriously imperil crop production, and in turn food security. An ongoing desert locust upsurge, primarily along the Red Sea periphery, possibly acts as a reminder to a natural threat that is often overlooked, or even deemed a thing of the past.

Swarms of locusts spread from North Africa

Countries today are considerably better equipped to deal with the threat than they used to be. The second half of the twentieth century has seen a dramatic decline in frequency, duration and intensity of desert locust plagues, largely thanks to improved control and monitoring capacities in the affected countries. "What we have done as a big improvement is to be able to monitor where the locust are and try to control them," says Pietro Ceccato, an environmental remote sensing expert with the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI) at Columbia University. "Now we have that information both from the control teams and from the satellite. We know where to target the control."

And yet, in anticipating future locust invasions, climate change appears to be one key unknown. "This year is a bit unusual," says Keith Cressman, senior locust forecasting officer at FAO. Normally, he explains, after a good breeding season like this year's, the locusts would move from Sudan to the interior of the Arabian Peninsula, across the Red Sea. This autumn, however, while some did reach Saudi Arabia, groups started migrating northwards to the interior of Sudan and further to Egypt, not before Sudanese authorities treated close to 270 square kilometres.

More http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/may/23/insects
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waltky · May 19, 2017

Granny says, "Dat's right - it's the end times, Jesus comin' back soon...

Greek island declares emergency over locust swarms
May 19, 2017 -- The Greek island of Agios Efstratios declared a state of emergency on Friday due to an ongoing seasonal locust plague, officials said.

Much of the plant life in the Aegean Sea island, which is home to about 200 residents, has been devoured by the locust swarms. Stella Spanou, a local administrator, told BBC News that sheep have even starved due to the lack of foliage.

Students from Athens traveled to the island and sprayed diflubenzuron and spinosad pesticides in attempts to fight the swarms, but the problem continues. "It's difficult because of the landscape -- they have to go on foot," Spanou said. "The eco-friendly chemicals are working, they got good results but there are still many locusts because they couldn't spray everywhere."

The island, located about 20 miles from the island Lemnos, has one village where Spanou said the chemicals cannot be used. The locust swarms are not thought to be migratory. Greece's General Secretariat for Civil Protection declared the emergency Wednesday night at the request of the North Aegean Region due to the insect troubles.

The island's mayor, Maria Kakkali, said scientists have "studied and concrete proposals have been made to address" the locust problem -- specifically, spraying the entire island with an eco-friendly chemical, Greece's Ta Nea reported. The mayor said the emergency declaration will allow the problem to be solved more quickly by loosening up bureaucracy.

http://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-N.../?utm_source=sec&utm_campaign=sl&utm_medium=8
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