There are many flying swarming insects and they seem to all be highly evolved and adapted to accomplish their tasks when swarming. Are the bees and locusts using sound to aid in their ability to fly more efficiently? If so can we use such knowledge to help bees pollinate more fields to increase crop yields by adding in the sound they need? Or on the flip side can use sound to defeat a locust plague, which threatens to wipe out thousands of square miles of crops? This topic came up recently in an online think tank in discussing the locust plagues in Africa and the devastation they were doing to the region by killing all the crops in a place where over population and starvation are already at issue. In the online think tank one member states; Bees share similar flight characteristics with others, like locusts. It is just that this time of year (Mid March) is when locusts become more active in N. Africa. Locusts; what is their critical weakness that allows their efficient demise, whether for harvesting and eating or to simply abate their advance and destruction. I am sure there are many who would appreciate knowing their ache-lies heel. So, you wish to use Noise Canceling Theories to cancel out the sound they make which gives them their advantage and so their wings cannot hold them up anymore and they either break or the insect falls to the ground and can no longer fly. But, we know they can hop, so we slow them down. But we also know that damaged Locusts are generally finished off by their fellow swarmers, so if you could do this then they would cannibalize themselves and thus you win. Interesting my thoughts previously were to steer them using sound to where you wanted them to go, around fields and agriculture. Insecticide is not working too slow to kill them, as they eat their way of devastation across the lands; plus insecticides, causes issues with the other animals. I have no problem with any of this really makes sense to me. If this is exactly how a Bee Flies and that the locust gets this same huge advantage in the same way. Which it might as many of them create more sound as they go, which allows them to go 100s of miles over water when they should not be able to, because of the energy requirements. Perhaps this think tank and its members are onto something, like a break thru even? Well, consider all this in 2006. |
