Farmers in Madagascar have once again had to witness their crops be destroyed by an annual plague of migratory locusts, which threatens the livelihoods of 13 million people.

Since April 2012, the creatures have descended on the land where nine million of the country's agriculture workers try to make their living.

The threat lies in the insects' voracious appetite, with one locust able to consume its body weight - about 2 grams - in a day. During plague season, billions of locusts swarm to the east African nation.

Photos of this year's ambush show the insects appear as vast clouds in the sky, while farmers attempt try and fail to protect their land with fire and makeshift battons.

What began as an upsurge in 2010 became a plague because campaigns to tackle the insects between 2010 and 2012 were underfunded, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nation (FAO).

In September 2013, the Ministry of Agriculture and FAO sought to tackle the problem and launched a Three-year emergency Programme, which aims to control locust populations and thereby protect millions of vulnerable people.

To protect Madagascar's naturally diverse ecosystem, control operations are carried out using bio pesticides.

Hundreds of dead fish are washing up along the shores of a Indian Lake in Logan County.

People enjoying the lake over the weekend made several calls to the Ohio Department of Natural Resources to make a report. They want to be sure the popular tourist lake is safe.

Hundreds of white bass surfaced so far.

"I've never seen this many fish before."

John Bodey has lived on Indian Lake for thirty five years. He notice a number of dead fish last week, lying on the dock behind his house.

"I think this is unusual, but it is not unusual for it to happen in some lakes."

According to the Ohio Department of National Resources, he's correct.

They call it a fish kill.

The discovery of the carcass of a dead Arctic beluga whale on a Scottish beach could plug a 200-year research gap for National Museums Scotland.

The NMS was contacted to identify the rotting remains washed up on Lunan beach, north of Arbroath.

DNA samples were sent off along with the mammal's skull and teeth and experts were thrilled with the results.

The whale is only the second specimen of beluga the museum has received - and the last one dates back to a stranding in the Firth of Forth in 1815.

Zena Timmons, assistant curator of vertebrates at NMS, helped to identify the animal after it was found by volunteers from the Keilor Trust and members of the Scottish Marine Animal Stranding Scheme. She said: "Staff from the Natural Sciences department at National Museums Scotland identified a specimen washed up at Lunan Bay as a beluga whale.

I was late rising this morning and when the phone rang and rang and then rang again I wa quite certain that there must be a special bird about. I was right, Dave Stone excitedly told me that there was a Ross's Gull at Bowling Green Marsh. Ross's Gull is an extreme rarity here in Devon and this one is in fact the first record for the Exe Estuary and one of just a handful ever recorded in the county. I dont particularly like these "twitches" being a a bit of a contradiction to what I like about about wildlife watching but if you want to see really rare birds then needs must.

Ross's Gull is a small gull which is an Arctic breeder and named after a Naval Officer, James Ross. It is a true bird of the far north and breeds in the north of Siberia and the North American continent in Northern Canada. When it has finished breeding it then flies even further north. Quite how this one came to be here in the South West of the UK is one of those mysteries that can never be solved. This lonely individual is a young, non-breeding bird in it's second year. I was expecting to see a much more attractively marked bird and have to confess to some disappointment in this regard. The legs are fleshy red and the beak is delicate and solidly black. The tail is distinctive in flight being wedge shaped with a noticeable blackish band on the end. As a young bird it has black markings on the wings reminiscent of a LIttle Gull. Adult birds lack these markings but in the summer and in breeding plumage, have a noticeable black band around the neck and also have a pinkish suffusion on the breast. This bird was feeding on small flying insects around one of the pools on Bowling Green Marsh which is apparently typical behaviour.

The worst grasshopper infestation in 20 years has become so thick around Albuquerque, N.M., that the airborne bugs are showing up on weather radar, officials said today.

"Albuquerque has not seen these levels of grasshoppers since the early-mid 1990′s," said John R. Garlisch, extension agent at Bernalillo County Cooperative Extension Service.

The National Weather Service said the air is so dense with the bugs that they appear on its radar like rain.

"We have actually been noticing the insects on radar since about Memorial Day," said NWS spokesman David Craft. "We have noticed the greatest impact on the radar during the evening, but they are noticeable at other times of the day, too."

"It is a nuisance to people because they fly into people's faces while walking, running, and biking. They are hopping into people's homes and garages, they splatter the windshield and car grill while driving, and they will eat people's plants," Garlisch said.

A slithering snake caused a power outage in Duncan, Comanche, Waurika and parts of Lawton in the predawn hours Saturday.

The snake crawled into a switch station shared by Western Farmers Electric Cooperative and Public Service of Oklahoma a mile south of Comanche to cause the problem, company officials said.

Power to 3,147 customers in Duncan, Comanche, Waurika and parts of Lawton was curtailed, at 3:31 a.m., but was restored by 4:46 a.m. after the snake's fried remains were removed, said Ed Bettinger, a spokesman for PSO.

The Cattle Raisers Federation in the northeastern Bolivian province of Beni reported Thursday that at least 60,000 head of livestock have died due to the cold wave that has beset the Andean nation for a week.

Federation director Carmelo Arteaga said that the situation "is desperate" and added that the sector needs $1 billion to repurchase the cattle that have been lost and to create the conditions to face natural disasters, radio Erbol reported.

Beni, Bolivia's main beef-producing province, was one of those most affected by serious flooding registered in the country between October and March, when thousands of head of cattle also perished.

An elusive snake turned a Wilkes County woman's trip to Winston-Salem into an expensive adventure and resulted in a fruitless two-day search for the reptile.

The incident began shortly after noon Wednesday when Joan Bumgarner was driving along U.S. 421 South in eastern Yadkin County, she said. Bumgarner was taking her sister to Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center for an appointment.

Bumgarner said she felt something brush against her leg as she drove her white Lexus RX 350 on the highway into western Forsyth County.

"I looked down and didn't see anything," Bumgarner said. "About 10 minutes later, I saw the (snake's) head coming from behind the rearview mirror. It must have crawled up from the seat."

A rotting sperm whale carcass on Queensland's Moreton Island is attracting large sharks and creating a stink for visitors.

The 11-metre whale washed up on Friday on the island's eastern side, having been dead for about 24 hours.

The cause of death is unknown, however, Moreton Bay is known to be heavily populated with bull sharks and bites can be seen on the mammal.

A ranger said the carcass was too large to move with a tractor and it was hoped it would be washed out to sea on the rising tide. Otherwise, the whale would be left to decompose on the beach.

Tourist Ben Dillaway said the rotting carcass smelled "putrid", adding he wasn't game to step foot in the water after spotting a "huge shark" just off the beach.

Washington - Species of plants and animals are becoming extinct at least 1,000 times faster than they did before humans arrived on the scene, and the world is on the brink of a sixth great extinction, a new study says.

The study looks at past a nd present rates of extinction and finds a lower rate in the past than scientists had thought. Species are now disappearing from Earth about 10 times faster than biologists had believed, said study lead author noted biologist Stuart Pimm of Duke University.

"We are on the verge of the sixth extinction," Pimm said from research at the Dry Tortugas. "Whether we avoid it or not will depend on our actions."

The work, published Thursday by the journal Science, was hailed as a landmark study by outside experts.

Pimm's study focused on the rate, not the number, of species disappearing from Earth. It calculated a "death rate" of how many species become extinct each year out of 1 million species.

In 1995, Pimm found that the pre-human rate of extinctions on Earth was about 1. But taking into account new research, Pimm and his colleagues refined that background rate to about 0.1.

Now, that death rate is about 100 to 1,000, Pimm said.Numerous factors are combining to make species disappear much faster than before, said Pimm and co-author Clinton Jenkins of the Institute of Ecological Research in Brazil. But the No. 1 issue is habitat loss. Species are finding no place to live as more places are built up and altered by humans.