Just when you think the apocalyptic weather updates have come to an end, Mother Nature comes around to slap you back into your seat and tell you to shut up. We’ve had a period of intense rain thanks to La Niña, an upcoming heatwave, alerts of a mosquito boom, and now we’re being told to prep for a swarm of locusts. Moses be damned.
Thanks to this last month of rainy weather whipping the shit out of the east coast, followed by the upcoming heatwave, Australia has essentially become a gorgeous breeding ground for all kinds of insects.
A couple of days ago we were told that all this muggy weather has become the perfect stage for mosquito populations to increase dramatically, but turns out that locust plagues can also be expected to hit the east coast — specifically Queensland, NSW and Victoria.
“We might be looking for that in January and February,” Australian National University’s (ANU) Insect Physiologist told the AAP.
“Although the eggs would be developing with all the rain, the question is – has the rain destroyed so many plants that there’s nothing for them to feed on?”
According to the Australian Plague Locust Commission (APLC), which I just discovered was an actual thing, folks are still cautious and watching out for the plague of locusts, as it is still uncertain whether or not the population of little grass nommers will explode just yet.
“If it’s going to start warming up and we still get some rainfall as predicted, then we will get an explosion of mosquitoes,” Professor Hoffman from the APLC said in a December update.
“After a spring like we’ve had, you get a lot of plant growth, and so there’s a potential for insects that eat plants to explode.
“We just have to watch this space and act accordingly.”
To add some more spice to the apocalyptic stew, CSIRO’s mozzie expert Dr Brendan Trewin has also warned folks to watch out for the Aedes aegypti mosquito during this La Niña season. You can recognise these suckers from the white striped bands on their legs.
This particular mozzie, which is usually found only in Queensland, carries diseases like dengue fever, and it’s apparently establishing itself in new parts of Australia. Great. *Internal screaming*.
“We don’t want the dengue fever mosquito spreading further south,” he said via 7 News.
“It was once found all the way to the Victorian border through these large rainwater tanks.”
I’m ready for the apocalypse. Just take us. I’ll be the first casualty in this movie, I refuse to be like John Cusack in 2012.
