Biological Plagues
When nature swarmed — the locust plagues, insect infestations and biological disasters that stripped the land bare.
Part of Natural Disasters
44 moments in this segment.
- — The locust plagues of antiquity. Locust plagues have haunted humanity for millennia, recorded in the Bible's Book of Exodus and in ancient Egyptian carvings.
- — The Plague of Justinian. The first recorded bubonic plague pandemic devastated the Byzantine Empire from 541 AD.
- — The Black Death. The deadliest pandemic in history, plague carried by fleas killed up to half of Europe from 1347.
- — The Columbian disease exchange. Old World diseases like smallpox killed a huge share of the indigenous population of the Americas after 1492.
- — The cocoliztli epidemics. Mysterious 'cocoliztli' epidemics killed millions in 16th-century Mexico, possibly a native salmonella.
- — The Great Plague of London. The last great outbreak of bubonic plague in England killed a quarter of London's people in 1665.
- — The Great Irish Famine. A potato blight caused a famine that killed a million and drove a million more to emigrate from Ireland.
- — The Broad Street cholera outbreak. John Snow traced a deadly 1854 London cholera outbreak to a single water pump, founding modern epidemiology.
- — The great wine blight. The phylloxera aphid destroyed most of Europe's vineyards in the 19th century, nearly ending winemaking.
- — The Rocky Mountain locust swarm. In 1875 the largest recorded locust swarm — trillions of Rocky Mountain locusts — darkened the skies of the American West before the species went extinct.
- — The great rinderpest panzootic. A cattle plague swept Africa in the 1890s, killing most of the continent's cattle and causing mass famine.
- — The North African locust invasions. Desert-locust swarms have swept North Africa and the Middle East for millennia, devouring everything green.
- — Dutch elm disease. A fungus spread by beetles killed most of the elm trees of Europe and North America in the 20th century.
- — The amphibian chytrid pandemic. A deadly fungus has driven dozens of frog species to extinction across the Americas and Australia.
- — The giant Nomura's jellyfish. Blooms of car-sized Nomura's jellyfish periodically clog nets and capsize boats in the Sea of Japan.
- — The emerald ash borer invasion. An invasive beetle from Asia has killed hundreds of millions of ash trees across North America since the 2000s.
- — The mountain pine beetle epidemic. A beetle outbreak, fuelled by warming winters, has killed vast tracts of pine forest across western North America.
- — The American chestnut blight. A fungus wiped out billions of American chestnut trees in the early 20th century, remaking eastern forests.
- — White-nose syndrome in bats. A cold-loving fungus has killed millions of hibernating bats across North America since 2006.
- — Jellyfish blooms. Massive jellyfish blooms have clogged power-plant intakes and fishing nets worldwide, a growing marine disruption.
- — The Madagascar locust plague. A locust plague swept Madagascar in 2013, threatening the food of half the island's people.
- — The cane toad invasion. Introduced to Australia in 1935, cane toads spread as a poisonous plague, killing native predators.
- — The sea lamprey invasion. Invasive sea lampreys nearly wiped out the Great Lakes fishery, latching onto fish and draining them.
- — The varroa mite and colony collapse. disorder have devastated honeybee populations worldwide.
- — The red imported fire ant. Invasive fire ants have spread across the U.S. South, Australia and China, delivering painful, sometimes deadly stings.
- — Crown-of-thorns starfish outbreaks. Population explosions of the coral-eating crown-of-thorns starfish periodically devastate Pacific reefs.
- — Bird and starling superflocks. Enormous flocks — murmurations of starlings, or invasive quelea in Africa — can strip fields and darken skies.
- — The lionfish invasion. Venomous Indo-Pacific lionfish have invaded the Caribbean and Atlantic, devouring native reef fish.
- — The screwworm and livestock. The flesh-eating screwworm fly, once eradicated in the U.S., still threatens livestock across the Americas.
- — The fall armyworm invasion. The fall armyworm spread across Africa and Asia from 2016, devastating maize crops and threatening food security for millions.
- — Jellyfish and the salmon farms. Jellyfish blooms have wiped out entire salmon farms and shut down power stations from Scotland to the Philippines.
- — The invasive ant plagues. Invasive 'crazy ants' and fire ants swarm homes and short out electronics across the warming world.
- — The 1918 influenza pandemic. The deadliest pandemic of the 20th century, the 1918 flu killed perhaps 50 million people worldwide.
- — The Florida manatee die-off. Warm-water losses and algae have driven record manatee deaths along Florida's coast.
- — The 2019-21 desert locust upsurge. The largest desert-locust upsurge in decades swept from East Africa across the Middle East to India.
- — The 2020 East Africa locust plague. The worst desert-locust upsurge in 70 years swept across East Africa and South Asia, swarms devouring crops across a dozen countries.
- — The East Africa locust invasion. Vast desert-locust swarms invaded Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia in 2020, the worst in 70 years.
- — The 'murder hornet' arrival. The invasive Asian giant hornet, dubbed the 'murder hornet', appeared in North America in 2020, threatening honeybees.
- — The 2021 Australian mouse plague. A biblical plague of mice overran farms and towns across eastern Australia, chewing through crops and infrastructure.
- — Mormon cricket infestations. Periodic swarms of flightless Mormon crickets carpet roads and towns across the American West, a recurring biblical-scale infestation.
- — The recurring locust threat. Warming and rain keep re-igniting desert-locust breeding, a standing threat to Africa and South Asia.
- — The 2024 double cicada emergence. Two periodical cicada broods — one 13-year, one 17-year — emerged together across the U.S. for the first time since 1803, in the trillions.
- — Australia's rabbit plagues. Rabbits, introduced in 1859, bred into a plague that stripped the Australian landscape before myxomatosis was released.
- — The Antonine Plague. A pandemic, probably smallpox, swept the Roman Empire from 165 AD, killing millions.
