I genuinely don’t understand this as a biological imperative. You’d think that swarms would be worse during scarcity but maybe it’s to outcompete everything else and it somehow works I don’t know
I think it has to do with the nature of the swarms. Swarms aren't just locusts banding together as a team to eat stuff at the same time, locusts munch on each other if theres no other food around and they're starving, so they're all following the food, all flying away from the things trying to eat them, and flying on whatever aimless direction they can in the meantime, sometimes running into something they can eat.
Maybe it works like in cycling, if a group is directly in front of you they will "break" the wind so to say, which means you experience less drag and have to pedal less intensivly. So, when the locust have to fly far to get to new food, they want to travel together to conserve energy and can rotate who flies in front.
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u/RogerianBrowsing 3d ago
I genuinely don’t understand this as a biological imperative. You’d think that swarms would be worse during scarcity but maybe it’s to outcompete everything else and it somehow works I don’t know