It was on a cool Tuesday afternoon that the residents of Sinanché, a small town in southeastern Mexico, first heard the hissing.
Looking out their windows, the leaves of the fruit trees in their back gardens had been licked clean, while chewed-on lemons, oranges and hoya covered the grass.
But not a single one of Sinanché’s some 3,100 residents had to look far for the culprit – or culprits, rather.
All they had to do was look up.
Miles-long clouds of locusts have been blanketing the skies above the state of Yucatán this week, flying through shopping plazas, smacking into the windows of apartment complexes and gobbling up anything green in local parks.
Social media users and the Mexican press both asked the same question: Is this a sign the world is coming to an end?
Farmers have said the blizzard of bugs has nibbled on their cornfields in the middle of harvest, though officials say the swarm will unlikely lead to any major losses to the agriculture sector.
Some farmers have tried to douse crops with pesticides in a bid to kill the insects.
With not enough vegetation to go around, the famished swarms have buzzed into urban areas to eat trees, bushes and flowers.
Mérida, the state capital about 30 miles southwest of Sinanché, however, has had no such luck.
Though Mérida hasn’t seen locust plagues for years, the city has now become overridden with thousands since Monday.
Paseo de Montejo, a major thoroughfare, the Tanlum, Hidalgo de Chuburná and Villas de Oriente neighbourhoods were particularly hard hit by the insects, the regional Mexican news outlet Posta reported.
Even a relatively modest one-square-kilometre locust swarm, about the size of a small park, can eat the same amount of food in a day as about 35,000 people and travel 100 miles.
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