Locust Outbreak Getting Underway In Australia - Reuters

[hatrack]

SYDNEY - Australia's wheat farmers, fresh from battling the country's worst drought in a century, are now threatened by a plague of locusts which have already begun to hatch from a sprawling "nursery" in the country's outback.

Early locust hatchings are the precursor of an expected full-scale outbreak in a few weeks' time, which should rival the one in 2000 that spawned up to 100 billion insects, officials said.
The new onslaught is taking place in the heart of Australia's wheat belt and on the fringe of populated areas, making it more threatening this time for farmers in the sparsely populated outback.

"It's quite a huge area," Heath McRae, an official with the Australian Plague Locust Commission, told Reuters yesterday. "It's been 20 years in some of those areas since people have seen locusts. There are reports of some early hatchings."

First hatchings are in northern New South Wales (NSW), in the Lightening Ridge opal mining district near Walgett, a major wheat center. "A serious locust situation is expected to develop in New South Wales in the spring," the locust commission warned in its latest bulletin."

EDIT

http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/26658/story.htm

[DaveFL99]

1. I bet that ups the Rapture index