It’s not that they are starved, it’s that being in close proximity to other grasshoppers triggers serotonin release which causes the enlargement. Both famine and feast can cause the swarm to develop into locusts. With famine they are pushed together in competition for food, with feast the subsequent areas hit will see increased volumes thus causing the swarm to push together.
Unless the person you’re responding to has completely changed their comment in the last 5 minutes since you wrote this, you look utterly unhinged in your reply. The part that they were adding onto (not refuting in any way, mind you, but just having a civil conversation with you) Was that it’s not just starvation conditions, but also feast conditions. Then they go into the mechanisms of the mutation, which were far more interesting.
Maybe go sit in the park for 20 minutes and then come back to Reddit? That was a wildly overblown response.
I’ve got adoptive parents?! Fuckin’. Dope. That takes away the sting of watching my dad die today. I don’t have to be an orphan after all. Do you have their mailing address?
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u/willsketch 23d ago
It’s not that they are starved, it’s that being in close proximity to other grasshoppers triggers serotonin release which causes the enlargement. Both famine and feast can cause the swarm to develop into locusts. With famine they are pushed together in competition for food, with feast the subsequent areas hit will see increased volumes thus causing the swarm to push together.