Schistocerca gregaria, the desert locust, frequently swarms the plains of Africa and Asia, destroying the food supply for millions of people. The species transitions between differently pigmented solitarious and gregarious (swarming) phases. The genetic and biochemical bases of pigmentation are understood in several model organisms, most notably the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster. We hypothesized that pigmentation genes in S. gregaria orthologous to those in D. melanogaster may play a role in the color changes that occur during swarming. To identify candidate pigmentation genes, we used publicly available data from the FlyBase, NCBI, and OrcAE databases to search for three known D. melanogaster dark pigmentation genes, black, tan, and ebony, in the draft genome of S. gregaria. Due to the evolutionary gap between the two organisms, some orthologous genes were difficult to detect. To bypass this issue, we used the German cockroach, Blatella germanica, as an intermediate organism because it is more closely related to Drosophila melanogaster and has a well-annotated genome. We developed a workflow to annotate D. melanogaster orthologs in S. gregaria and found one candidate ortholog for ebony, one candidate ortholog for tan, and two candidate co-orthologs for black. We plan to confirm these candidate pigmentation genes by analyzing RNA from S. gregaria and related locust species with completed transcriptomes. We will also analyze expression differences between swarming and non-swarming locusts and continue to look for other pigmentation genes. Ultimately, we want to knock out these genes in grasshopper to test their role in pigmentation causally.