MILLIONS of pink locusts have made a freakish appearance in Cyprus and clouds have been sighted in Lebanon for the first time in nearly a hundred years. Israel, too, is on alert for the destructive insects.

Similar locusts, which are harmless to humans, have devastated crops across West Africa in recent months. They looked like a “cross between a jumbo shrimp and a grasshopper”, one British Cyprus resident said after fishing one out of his swimming pool.

The swarm was treated with zero tolerance by Cypriot authorities anxious to protect potato and other crops. Teams were soon spraying open areas. Farmers were offered free pesticides for fields and greenhouses were sealed.

Officials said that the locusts, believed to have originated in Central Africa, caused some damage to potato crops in the southwestern Paphos area, where about 30,000 Britons own retirement and holiday homes, but they had shown no interest in the area’s banana and citrus trees.

Andreas Kazantzis, a senior officer at the Agriculture Ministry in Paphos, said yesterday: “There are millions of them. It is like looking at a very, very dense net.”

The RAF at the sovereign military base of Akrotiri was also on alert. “The locusts could threaten air traffic,” Captain Peter Thacker, a British military spokesman, said. “We have sophisticated air defences, but these weren’t designed to battle locusts.”

Experts believed that the swarm had spread on winds from North Africa, attracted by unseasonably hot weather and heavy rain. It was 29C (84F) yesterday on the western coast of Cyprus, where the locusts were first detected on Sunday. A larger swarm arrived there yesterday afternoon.

Cyprus is home to smaller, mainly green locusts that are easily controlled, according to Andreas Satchias, an entomologist and environment officer at the Agriculture Department in Nicosia. Never in his 30 years in the job had he come across such a spectacle as the swarm of pink, African locusts.

The insects pleased birdwatchers. “The outbreak is a potential bonanza for the birds,” Martin Hellicar, of BirdLife Cyprus, said. An EU-approved insecticide, considered to be one of the safest for birds, had been used on fields and farmers were cautioned against spraying near beehives or flowers.

In Lebanon Nasri Qaawar, of the American University of Beirut, said that the locusts had arrived too late in the season to be a serious threat. “Temperatures have cooled, so they will not be able to multiply,” the professor said. He suggested manual measures to fight the locusts rather than spraying.

Pesticides had also been used before the insects had a chance to recover from their Mediterranean flight, Lebanese officials said. Clouds of locusts that had gathered over the Jbeil region, north of Beirut, were expected to head for the Gulf states. Yesterday there were reports that the insects had also reached southern Turkey.

Between 1914 and 1918 locusts ravaged Lebanon, causing a famine that triggered a wave of emigration to North and South America.

WHEN HUNGER HAS WINGS

• Most North African locusts are pink but elsewhere red, yellow and brown locusts predominate
  
• A large swarm can eat 80,000 tons of corn a day
  
• Swarms vary from less than one sq km to several hundred sq km. Each sq km may have 40 million to 80 million
  
• A swarm can travel more than 80 miles a day
  
• They are most prevalent in Northwest Africa, Middle East and Western Asia
  
• In China, the Government has sought to fight locusts with natural predators: restaurants have been banned from serving frogs and ducks have been released into affected areas

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