The hunting party moved in a hurry, but it was not easy to move forward with a large pile of meat.
All the worker ants held the meat in their big jaws. They formed a group of three to five and formed a ball around the piece of meat, moving forward slowly.
Any slight obstacle on the road can pose a serious challenge. Several teams fell down a steep slope on the road, and then hurriedly retrieved the pieces of meat and continued climbing.
Soldier ants also began to join the transport team. With the joint efforts of the entire hunting team, the group finally arrived at the "transfer station" at sunset.
This "transfer station" is a material transfer center established when the protagonist conquered the hills in the south. Now there is only a small team of guards stationed there, including twenty soldier ants and thirty worker ants, commanded by an old retired male ant.
After Nobita arrived at the "transit station" with his hunting team, he followed the male ant's practice and visited the older male ants stationed here.
After communicating with the older male ants, I realized that something big had happened near the "transit station"!
The older male ant said that he sent a messenger to "Dongyang City" the day before yesterday to report the recent changes near the "Transfer Station" to the protagonist, but he never waited for the messenger to return. He was worried that the messenger had an accident on the way and failed to report it. Messages are delivered or replies are sent back.
This kind of thing is not uncommon. Ant messengers acting alone are not very capable of protecting themselves. Although they mainly move along the ant track, they occasionally encounter fierce insect attacks.
According to convention, after it is considered that the courier may not have completed the task, depending on the distance of the journey, the sender will send a new courier after waiting for a certain period of time without receiving a reply.
The older male ant originally planned to send a messenger to "Dongyang City" the next day, but it happened that Nobita and his party were leaving tomorrow, so the older male ant asked Nobita and his party to deliver the message on his behalf.
The situation that the older male ants need to report is urgent - a large number of locusts have appeared near the "transit station"!
——I am the dividing line——
Locusts in a broad sense, commonly known as "grasshoppers", belong to the order Orthoptera, including species of the superfamily Grasshopper superfamily, grasshopper superfamily, and Acridoidea. There are more than 10,000 species in the world, and they are distributed in vast tropical and temperate grassland and desert areas. Locusts mainly include migratory locusts and soil locusts. East Asian migratory locusts and Asian migratory locusts are common in areas along rivers.
Among the adults of East Asian migratory locust, the body length of male adults ranges from 35.5 to 41.5mm, and the body length of female adults ranges from 39.5 to 51.2mm. The body color of locusts is usually green or yellow-brown, which often varies due to environmental factors. The face is vertical and the antennae are light yellow. The midline of the pronotum is well developed, the scattered type is slightly arc-shaped when viewed from the side, the group type is slightly concave, and there are often dark vertical stripes on both sides. The forewings are narrow and long, often exceeding the middle of the tibia of the hind legs, with brown and dark markings, and the group type is darker. The hind wings are colorless and transparent. The gregarious type sometimes has two inconspicuous dark stripes on the upper side of the hind leg segments, while the solitary type often disappears or is not obvious. The hind tibiae are usually orange-red, slightly lighter in gregarious form, and usually have 10 to 11 spines along the outer edge.
Locusts are generally facultative diapausing insects and mostly overwinter with their eggs in egg sacs in the soil. Only a few species, such as Japanese yellow-spine locust and short-legged locust, overwinter as adults.
The annual effective accumulated temperature, food, light and the growth and development of each insect stage in different areas will affect the number of generations of locusts. For example, Asian migratory locusts generally have one generation per year, East Asian migratory locusts have two, or even three or incomplete generations in warm areas, and up to 4 to 5 generations in tropical areas.
Both adult locusts and locust flies stay nocturnal and emerge during the day, and have no obvious phototaxis. When the density of migratory locusts is high, conditioned reflexes are formed due to mutual perception and the activities are intensified. Locusts are prone to swarm, lie dormant, crowded, and then jump and migrate in a certain direction. This is a locust plague.
The locust plague is a disaster for the vegetation in the affected areas. The feeding habits of adult locusts and locust flies are the same, they are both herbivorous, and the adult stage supplements nutrition intensively, accounting for more than 75% of the total food intake in a lifetime. They use their chewing mouthparts to bite plant leaves and flower buds into nicks and holes. In severe cases, they will eat up the leaves and flower buds of large areas of plants, causing an ecological crisis.
Some locust species are oligophagous pests, such as the East Asian migratory locust, which only feeds on plants of the Poaceae and Cyperaceae families; some species are polyphagous, such as the Great Apex-winged Locust. Generally speaking, locusts feed most on weeds such as reeds, barnyard grass and red grass (Odi).
When the season is dry, locusts become more voracious, and the large amounts of food they eat are excreted without being fully digested in order to obtain a large amount of water to supply physiological metabolic needs, thus increasing the degree of damage to plants.
Once a locust plague breaks out, it will be extremely harmful.
Although locusts are an important part of the ecosystem, many harmful locust species can cause varying degrees of harm to nature.
Taking the protagonist's original world as an example, there are more than 10,000 species of locusts in the world, of which about 300 species can cause locust disasters. Locusts can occur in areas around the world except Antarctica and Eurasia north of 550 degrees north latitude.
The area where locusts occur all year round in the world reaches 46.8 million square kilometers, and 1/8 of the world's population is regularly attacked by locust plagues.
There are more than 1,000 known species of locusts in China, of which about 60 species can cause harm. According to historical records of our country for thousands of years, the locusts that cause devastating agricultural disasters are mainly migratory locusts. It is believed that drought and migratory locusts have the greatest chance or correlation of occurring in the same year, followed by drought in the previous year and floods first and then later. Drought causes grasshoppers to swarm; locust disasters, floods, and droughts often occur alternately and have always been the three natural disasters that seriously threaten my country's agricultural production and affect people's lives.
Since the 1980s, affected by abnormal global climate change, disrepair or improper construction of certain water conservancy projects, and sudden changes in agricultural ecology and environment, East Asian migratory locusts have frequently occurred in the Huanghuaihai region and southwestern Hainan Island, seriously threatening agricultural production.
In the 12 years from 1985 to 1996, East Asian migratory locusts occurred continuously in locust areas such as the Yellow River Bank, Hainan Island, and Tianjin. In the autumn of 1985, a high-density gregarious swarm of East Asian migratory locusts ate up more than 100,000 acres of reed leaves and hundreds of acres of corn ears in Beidagang, Tianjin. Then they took off at noon on September 20 and migrated south. The swarm was about 30 meters wide from east to west. kilometers, it landed in five counties of Cangxian, Huanghua, Haixing, Yanshan and Mengcun in Hebei Province and two farms in Zhongjie Dagang, affecting an area of 2.5 million acres. This is the first time that gregarious East Asian migratory locusts have migrated across provinces since the founding of New China.
In 1998, summer locusts of East Asian migratory locusts occurred in eight provinces including Shandong, Henan, Hebei and Tianjin. In 1999, summer locusts of East Asian migratory locusts occurred again in nine provinces including Shandong, Henan, Hebei and Tianjin. Locusts are raging in Henan again. In some areas, the locust density has reached more than 4,000 locusts per square meter. The large area and high insect population density are unprecedented in Henan in 25 years.
In 1983-1984, 1986 and 1987, gregarious Asian migratory locusts occurred in the Tacheng area of Xinjiang. The affected area reached 30.05 million acres, and the density in the Altay area of Tacheng reached tens of thousands per square meter.
The Tibetan migratory locust plague occurred in Tibet for 12 consecutive years from 1846 to 1857, and affected 18 areas. In severe cases, there was no crop harvest for consecutive years, no highland barley, wheat, and no grass was harvested.
