Lubbers

MOBILE, Alabama -- It’s high summer, and a creeping wave of lubbers is marching across the land eating everything in sight.
Present in seemingly uncountable numbers, the annual appearance of swarms of giant grasshopper relatives in the Mobile-Tensaw Delta and along the edges of the Causeway each August brings to mind biblical accounts of locust plagues.

Dozens of baby lubbers, a close relative of grasshoppers, crawl across a dried palmetto frond on a shellmound in the Mobile-Tensaw Delta. Hatching out in March and April, the babies gorge on anything green through the spring and summer without fear of predators thanks to toxic compounds in their bodies. By August, the large adults, up to four inches long, are mowing their way across the Delta and through Alabama gardens like a giant eating machine. (Ben Raines, Press-Register)
Hatching out in March or early April, millions of lubbers gorge themselves for months on spring’s fresh greenery.

By the heat of the summer, they have grown exponentially, from the size of a grain of rice to monsters nearly 4 inches long. Around Mobile, lubbers tend to be a glossy black, with distinctive red or yellow piping running along the legs, head, and abdomen.
In a neat trick of nature, the adults are believed to focus their diets on certain plants that render their plump bodies poisonous to predators.
“You wonder why are they black if they are sitting on green vegetation all the time,” said John McCreadie, a University of South Alabama entomologist, discussing the showy coloration of the lubbers. “They are advertising the fact that they are toxic. They are saying if you eat me, you are eating poison.”

Does this happen EVERY year???