119 



THE LOCUST IN CYPRUS 



By W. p. DELANE STEBBING, F.G.S. 



The Locust plague in Cyprus which so many early writers have 

 mentioned and which was one of the problems which had to be grappled 

 with on the British occupation in 1878, is now almost a thing of the past. 

 But while locusts are usually thought of as large insects, such as the 

 Syrian species with its orange body and brown-blotched wings, the one 

 which has to be dealt with in the island, and was ah annual plague, is 

 a small indigenous brown-marked species of undistinguished appearance 

 known as Stavronotus cruciatus. This small locust, which dwells on 

 rocky and poor land from which, in its larval walking and'hopping stage, 

 it invades the cultivated areas near by, in its normal state is not 

 migratory nor is the perfect insect able to take long flights. The 

 damage it did was due to its general distribution and to ignorance of 

 the creature's habits. With Eastern fatalism it was a plague of God 

 and that was enough, while there was the inability, intensified by a 

 natural aversion to combine forces, of a poor and sparse population to 

 cope with it. 



Like the poor, this locust is always with the islanders and only pre- 

 ventive measures continued from year to year could be satisfactory. 

 The main methods by which the plague has been made negligible are 

 three : 



1. Egg collecting — easily done as the egg masses are always laid in 

 light soil bordering the fields. 



2. Stopping the crawling larval hosts in their progress by trenches 

 on the further side of which were screens topped with a strip of American 

 cloth. As they were unable to surmount this they fell back into the 

 trench where they were suffocated by those coming after ; and 



3. Sprinkling feeding areas with a bacterial "cultivation" which 

 gave them an epidemic disease. 



It has not been necessary to use the second of these for many years 

 and the annual expenditure on the first is almost negligible; but as a 



