The Multivariate Regression Models Suggested as Standardising Tools for Categorising Solitarious and Gregarious Groups of the Main Pest Locust, , Produce Reproducible Results.

Outbreaks of the desert locust affect some of the poorest parts of Africa, with devastating outcomes. The key to understanding and dealing with this problematic adaptation to environmental changes is comparing gregarious and solitarious locusts, either in nature or in laboratories. Categorising locusts and detecting changes in their phase status is key to such comparisons, which have been hitherto based on applying mathematical models that use behavioural parameters and that each laboratory has to build anew for each experiment.