The grasshopper swarm in Las Vegas was so big it looked like a storm on weather radar

Ed Komenda

LAS VEGAS – On Friday night, meteorologists in southern Nevada looked at the pulsing green images on the weather radar and discovered there was much more to it than the raindrops of scattered thunderstorms swirling on the screen.

"Insect swarms," National Weather Service meteorologist Kate Guillet said.

Most of the flurry found on the screen, she said, was a sprawling swarm of pallid-winged grasshoppers now plaguing the neon lights, streets and sidewalks of Las Vegas.

The service posted a photo of the radar images to Twitter Friday night, showing what looked like a large storm moving east-to-west across the Las Vegas Valley.

While some of the activity in the northern sector of the radar display included rain, a majority of the green coloring in the southern half of Las Vegas represented an insect invasion so large it registered on weather radar.

“Haven’t seen something like this in a long time,” Guillet said.

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Grasshoppers swarm a sidewalk a few blocks off the Strip on July 26, 2019 in Las Vegas, Nevada. - Massive swarms of grasshoppers have descended on the Las Vegas Strip this week, startling tourists and residents as they pass through town on their northbound migration. Videos posted on social media show swarms of the bugs, called pallid-winged grasshoppers, converging on the bright neon lights of the Strip and sidewalks covered with the insects. (Photo by BRIDGET BENNETT/AFP / AFP)BRIDGET BENNETT/AFP/AFP/Getty Images ORIG FILE ID: AFP_1J52LP

Biological targets

The National Weather Service upgraded its radar system in the spring of 2012.

Enhancements made the service's weather sampling capabilities much more sensitive, able to differentiate between large raindrops, small raindrops – and sometimes even biological entities.

The most common "biological targets" captured on weather radar in southern Nevada are birds and bats.

Grasshoppers on the move

A wet spring expedited the insect swarm's northern migration, but the bugs are not dangerous.

"They don’t carry any diseases, they don’t bite, they’re not even one of the species that we consider a problem," said Jeff Knight, an entomologist with the Nevada Department of Agriculture. "They probably won’t cause much damage in a yard.”

The grasshoppers are attracted to ultraviolet light. That's why the insects are often found swarming glowing bulbs of white light.

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The jumpy bugs are likely to remain in transit across southern Nevada over the next several weeks, Knight said.

The state has records as far back as the early 1960s of Nevada grasshopper invasions. In three decades as an entomologist, Knight has seen the insects visit southern Nevada four or five times.

In 2010, state agriculture officials geared up for a springtime invasion of crop-eating grasshoppers in northern Nevada.

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Follow Ed Komenda on Twitter: @ejkomenda

This article originally appeared on Reno Gazette Journal: Las Vegas grasshopper swarm was so big it showed up on weather radar