Brilliant 10: Arianne Cease Prevents Biblical Plagues With Modern Data
Arianne Cease Alexander Wells In 2005, Arianne Cease was a Peace Corps volunteer in Senegal when disaster struck: Her small rural village was attacked by locusts and other grasshoppers, destroying a year’s harvest and the villagers’ food supply. “The whole village was covered with them,” she recalls. “They had eaten even the bark off the trees.” Insect swarms regularly sweep across the globe, causing billions of dollars in crop loss. Cease saw that pesticides didn’t seem to help. So when she left Senegal, she set out to find something that would. Now a biologist at Arizona State University, Cease investigates what transforms individual locusts, which are harmless, into ravenous swarms that threaten the livelihoods of one in 10 people on the planet. She leads a research network that includes biologists, economists, and geographers...