Episode Information

Since records began, immense swarms of locusts have regularly descended upon the prairies and fields of Western Africa, leaving in their wake desolate landscapes and destitute populations. Thought to be the eighth plague of Egypt, locust swarms have been known and feared since antiquity. Yet what do we actually know about locusts? What conditions make an apparently inoffensive insect metamorphose into a fearsome super-predator? Do they have some kind of collective intelligence that enables them to swarm? In this film, we follow the French entomologist Antoine Foucard during his last mission to Niger and Mauritania and discover the complexity of this insect and its multiple life phases, which until now have been widely unknown.