Self-interest drives locust swarms

EGYPT’S brief flirtation with democracy came to a tearful end. Regimes pay lip service to ‘the will of the people’, but it’s a principle ‘more honoured in the breach than in the observance’.

Is majority rule, pioneered by the Greeks over two millennia ago, found elsewhere in the animal kingdom? Geese migrate in flocks and great herds of wildebeest cross the African plains. Do dominant individuals within these assemblies decide when to set out and where to go, or is it a case of democratic ‘mob rule’?

‘Behold, tomorrow will I bring the locusts ... they shall cover the face of the Earth and shall eat every tree which groweth for you out of the field’; the 8th plague was visited upon Pharaoh who wouldn’t let Moses and his people go. Like the Mongol army of Genghis Khan, quadrillions of desert locusts went on the rampage.