Жоқ болған тау шабылы (Rocky Mountain locust)

Extinct species of grasshopper

The Rocky Mountain locust (Melanoplus spretus) is an extinct species of grasshopper that ranged through the western half of the United States and some western portions of Canada with large numbers seen until the end of the 19th century. Sightings often placed their swarms in numbers far larger than any other locust species, with one famous sighting in 1875 estimated at 198000 square miles (512,818 km2) in size (greater than the area of California), weighing 27.5 million tons and consisting of some 12.5 trillion insects, the greatest concentration of animals ever speculatively guessed, according to Guinness World Records. Because a creature so ubiquitous was not expected to become extinct, very few specimens were ever collected (though a few preserved remains have been found in Knife Point Glacier, Wyoming and Grasshopper Glacier, Montana). Walsh does not provide a description of the species, except for female wing length, as well as some aspects of biology, ecology, and control. Some entomologists credit the authority for the binomial Caloptenus spretus to C. Thomas, but fails on the Principle of Priority. The treatment under the genus Melanoplus began in 1878 in publications by S. H. Scudder who pointed out the difference between the genus Caloptenus that he noted as being more correctly spelled Calliptenus and Melanoplus. The species is reported to have descended from the Rocky Mountains to the prairie in large numbers only in certain years, particularly in dry seasons, following westward wind currents. Outbreaks usually lasted two consecutive years. Although a great number of eggs were laid on the prairie during outbreak years, individuals hatched from these eggs usually did not thrive, a condition that has been attributed to the lack of adaptation of this species to prairie habitats. A 2004 molecular phylogenetic study that used mitochondrial DNA from specimens obtained from museums and fragments preserved in frozen glacial deposits confirms the placement in the genus Melanoplus and the distinctiveness as a species (ie not a migratory form of an extant species). It also identified the closest living relative as Melanoplus bruneri rather than M. sanguinipes as had been earlier surmised. Large numbers of grasshoppers including a large number of Rocky Mountain locusts entombed in the ice in the Rocky Mountains gave their name to the Grasshopper Glacier.

Rocky Mountain locusts caused farm damage in Maine from 1743 to 1756 and Vermont in 1797–1798. while the permanent breeding grounds of this species seemed to be restricted to an area somewhere between 3 and 3,000 square miles of sandy soils near streams and rivers in the Rockies, which coincided with arable and pastoral lands exploited by settlers.

Assumption Chapel in Cold Spring, Minnesota, was established as a Christian pilgrimage shrine (Wahlfahrtsort) (Gnadenkapelle) in 1877 by German American Catholic pioneer farmers, supposedly to keep away future locust plagues similar to those they had faced in both the 1850s and the 1870s. The Feast Day of St. Magnus of Füssen, who is traditionally known in Southern Germany as one of the protectors of farmers from thunderstorms and plagues of vermin, on September 6 was locally celebrated as "Grasshopper Day". The 1877 pilgrimage chapel dedicated to St. Boniface in nearby St. Augusta, Minnesota dates from the same era and was built for exactly the same reason. There is a similar local tradition of pilgrimages to the shrine on June 5th, the Feast Day of St. Boniface, an English Benedictine missionary, Bishop, and martyr instrumental to the Christianisation of the Germanic peoples; and who is still revered as the "Apostle to the Germans", Patron Saint of the Germanosphere and the German diaspora. A fictionalized description of the devastation created by Rocky Mountain locusts in the 1870s can be found in the 1937 novel On the Banks of Plum Creek by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Her description was based on actual incidents in western Minnesota during the summers of 1874 and 1875 as the locusts destroyed her family's wheat crop.