USDA forecasts a plague of grasshoppers for 2010

With plumes of crude oil destroying the Gulf of Mexico, tensions rising in the middle east, a severe hurricane season reving up in the Atlantic, and the earth opening up and just plain swallowing parts of Guatemala City whole, what else could possibly go wrong?

Well. How about a plague of locusts?*

The USDA has just announced that the conditions are ripe for a grasshopper outbreak in the northern great plains:

The U.S. Department of Agriculture's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) is expecting potentially heavy grasshopper outbreaks this year in a number of western States beginning in early June and lasting throughout the summer. These estimates are based on the unusually high population of adult grasshoppers in these States at the end of the summer of 2009, indicating that a large number of eggs may have been laid.

Great. What's next? Frogs? Boils? Darkness?

* not really locusts. We drove our native locust to extinction a long while ago.