‘Fear and Locusts in Las Vegas’ may have made a great headline for this article, but the winged loiterers that have flocked to the bright lights in Las Vegas are pallid-winged grasshoppers.
Social media have been inundated with videos of the grasshoppers chirping around in the night skies above Las Vegas casinos.
In one particularly fascinating clip, they were filmed flying above the Luxor Hotel's pyramid.
“It was crazy. We didn’t even want to walk through there. Everybody was going crazy,” tourist Diana Rodriquez told a local TV station.
The plague has been dubbed on social media the Great Grasshopper Invasion of 2019, while some people say it looks like something out of the Book of Exodus.
And there’s never a bad time to get political.
Incidentally, the invasion took place as millions of alien enthusiasts and jokesters are planning to ‘storm’ the top-secret Area 51, and some tongue-in-cheek speculation suggests that the military has something to do with the grasshoppers.
According to entomologists, wet weather in the past several months is to blame for the scale of the invasion.
"It appears through history that when we have a wet winter or spring, these things build up often down below Laughlin and even into Arizona," said Jeff Knight from the Nevada Department of Agriculture. "We'll have flights about this time of the year, migrations, and they'll move northward."
He explained that such migrations are rare but not unprecedented, and that the insects don’t cause any harm to humans.
The grasshoppers are expected to be gone in several weeks as they will continue to move to the north.