Morning Starters: Summer 2 - Human Animal Conflict
Did You Know?
Locusts are a farmer’s worst nightmare in places like Madagascar. These insects travel in swarms of billions, devouring every crop in their path and leaving families desperate to save their livelihoods. To stop this disastrous destruction, farmers use chemicals and clever traps to protect their fields. Despite their efforts, locust plagues frequently occur, threatening the food supplies of entire communities.
Where in the world is the Madagascar Click the 🌍
Word Challenge
Create a word cline, showing how eating can go from slow and small to fast and large amounts.
Example:
nibble → snack → ? → ? → ? → devour → gobble
Grammar Challenge
Rewrite the sentence below, adding a parenthesis after the word ‘locusts’.
The plague of locusts (an unstoppable force of nature) descended on the farmer’s field, devouring every leaf in its path.
Help: Parentheses are punctuation marks (brackets, dashes and commas), used to add extra information to a sentence.
Number Challenge
Fact: A desert locust weighs approximately 2 grams and can eat its own body weight in vegetation each day.
Using this fact, calculate the amount of vegetation eaten daily by the following numbers of locusts:
1) 1,800 locusts
2) 3,600 locusts
3) 9,578 locusts
Critical Thinking
In some parts of the world, people regularly eat insects (including locusts) as part of their diet.
Would you eat a locust? Why? Why not?