The Cockroach Thread

[Anonymous]

not the most pleasant but still bizarre event must relate.
had apartment filled with cockroaches. all over the place. landlord sprayed which oddly brought them out and then paralyzed them. the landlord left and i had to sweep up these twitching paralyzed cockroaches by the dustpan ful.

i got down to just one or two (sending them down the toilet or Loo as you might call it) and then suddenly one of the last somehow jumped at the last minute avoiding being sent down the toilet. he somehow knew what was coming and jumped to avoid the water and land on the seat. sadly for him i was too impatient with his intelligent tricks and flicked him down.

what was really strange was up to that point he had been paralyzed but apparently with a great effort tried to survive.

coincidence or some sort of jungian collective super intelligence among these critters?

 

[Dingo667]

Well, as much as I'd hate having cockies in my house, I have come to like them because of one I watched.
I was an au pair and had come to the flat [in Paris] an hour too early. Instead of going back, I decided to just sit in the living room. It was early morning about 6:a.m. Ther was a glass desk in that room, with two legs [wide, chrome]. The legs were not attached on the corners but underneath, so there was no leg to walk down on.
On this table was a cockroach.
I decided to watch it [as you do]...
It walked to all four sides and looked "down" [including moving its head downwards]. It was amazing to see that it looked down all sides first. Then when it couldn't find anywhere to climb down on, it walked back to the only side pointing to the middle of the room, walked back a few scattles and then legged it and JUMPED. It missed the carpet by only a few centimeters and landed with a "pock"-sound on its back on the wooden floorboards.
This was when I thought I'd better check it out. It was completely still, and I thought it was dead but after blowing [from a good distance] on it, it started wrigg,ing its feet.
Being a bastard myself and it not being my flat, I helped the roach back on its feet and off it ran. Ahhhhhhhhh....
I laughed quite a bit about this and I still think that behaviour was quite intelligent. 8)

 

[Human_84]

Bugs can be real fun to watch (if they're outside). They can be real smart or real dumb. I once saw a spider trying to get up onto a ledge, and he kept going back and forth looking for the easiest place to get up. He kept on going past a certain point that would of been easiest. I do not understand such things like this.

 

[michelleeb1970]

Rats are good too. (I have no objection to rats at all). We've some living in the hedges surrounding my home, and they dig through rubbish bags (which is why you shouldn't put out your rubbish until the day of collection, residents of London!). Well, next door put their bags on top of a small concrete bin cupboard, outide, to keep them away from the rats. (It had no door, so they couldn't put them inside). Well, one morning I watched the rats try, and fail to jump up to the top of it, and fail to jump across to it from a small wall. Then they noticed a cardboard box leaning against the wall, and nosed it and pushed it until it tipped, against the bin cupboard...giving them a handy little run up to the bin bag I was very impressed by this!

 

[fullcoyote]

In the book The Seven Mysteries of Life, Guy Murchie describes the surprising intelligence of insects, especially those that live in colonies and hives. Bees, for example, not only can communicate complex bits of information, such as the location of good pollen patches, but solve simple mathematical puzzles set to them by experimenters.

That said, is there really anything strange in a cockroach trying to escape from an oversized predator? Seems like normal prey behaviour to me. Your cockroach probably wasn't as paralyzed as the other twitchers.

By the way, Murchie's book is highly recommended reading -- chock full of Fortean goodness.

 

[J_Frank_Parnell]

cockroaches, eh? must say i'm no fan having once lived in a flat riddled with them. but you've got to respect them. apart from all that withstanding a nuclear war stuff etc, they really are amazingly hard little buggers.

the usaf did tests on the effects of kerosene pollution on insect life back in the 50s/60s or something (hey it's late). most insects couldn't live within 5m of a spill, several others such as earwigs could go right up to the edge of the spill but roaches could not only live on the spill, they actually drank the stuff and survived. now that's rock!

coming back to the thread... if it was the last roach to be dumped down the chodbin then perhaps the effects were beginning to wear off? otherwsie, i'm prepared to go with the notion of some uber survival mechanism.

some roach facts:

1) female roaches, like mantises, keep their eggs in a thing called an ooethaca (spelling), which is basically like a special egg box (honest!). if the pregnant roach is crushed the ooethaca will catapult the eggs all other the place. therefore, if you have roaches and u want to control them, DO NOT stamp on them. the best way is to get a geko or use sterilising chemicals (not very green but effective).

2) for every 1 roach you see it is generally accepted that there are at least 200 lurking nearby that you cant see.

3) roaches love to feel pressure on their bodies and therefore prefer to hang out in cracks. they also prefer the darkness (not the band) and hence they just love peoples' cracks (in their walls etc)

4) they will eat virtually anything. locking away your food is not good enough as they will readily munch on anything from soap to the dried wallpaper paste attached to your walls.

5) their favourite food is flour as it is a very easy-to-eat and concentrated carbohydrate.

6) the german cockroach in germany is known as the polish cockroach. in poland it is known as the russian cockroack. in russia, i think the prussian cockroach although they are believed to have come out of asia if i recall correctly.

7) if you cut a cockroach's head off it will die of starvation after about seven to nine days.

8 ) despite spreading disease and tainting food and affecting people's allergies with thier dead scales, roaches are very 'clean' animals in that they spend a lot of time preening and cleaning themselves. it's just a shame then that they roll around in shit the rest of the time.

9) while not social animals in the context of bees, termites and greys, they really enjoy each others' company and send each other chemical signals to attract the party.

10) 80 percent of a typical infestation will be located in the kitchen for obvious reasons.

11) they are masterminding some kind of david icke-style global conspiracy and must be stopped before it's too late.

12) they have no preference for or against the music of roachford, who is himself a giant moth.

 

[lardfan]

I agree on the global takeover conspiracy theory and I think we have to accept that they are virtually indestructible - while preparing my dinner once, I inadvertantly microwaved a roach on high for 6 minutes, and he came scuttling out afterwards, looking happy as larry.

 

[ProfessorF]

More roach facts:

You've probably heard the story about cockroaches surviving a nuclear war: we die but they live! This is supposed to make you feel better when you have trouble getting rid of these critters.
So, the real truth: radiologists have found that humans can safely withstand a one-time exposure of 5 rems (A "rem" is the dosage of radiation that will cause a specific, measured amount of injury to human tissue). A lethal dose is 800 rems or more (people are exposed to about 16 rems during their lifetime).

Insect researchers have found that cockroaches can tolerate a much higher dose -- really higher! The lethal dose for the American cockroach is 67,500 rems and for the German cockroach it is between 90,000 and 105,000 rems (yikes!). In truth the amount of radiation that cockroaches can withstand is equivalent to that of a thermonuclear explosion. So, show a little respect the next time your chasing one through the kitchen with a spray can in your hand!

Reprinted from the Urban Pest Control Research Center Newsletter, April 8, 1996. By Bill Robinson, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Department of Entomology

which'd be why a puny microwave is no match for the mighty 'roach...

Scientists claim some female cockroaches prefer weaker partners because they like gentle sex.
A University of Manchester team has concluded stronger male cockroaches are too aggressive and often injure their partners. However, the females produce fewer babies with weaker partners. The scientists studied the sex life of the Tanzanian cockroach Nauphoeta cinerea and have published their results in the science journal Nature.
Elisabet Forsgren, a behavioural ecologist at G?teborg University in Sweden, commented: "People have taken it for granted that females should prefer dominant males. "But there are about a dozen species, from moths to birds to salamanders, where this has been shown not to be the case."

Awww, they're actually quite sensitive little critters.

 

[peterbernard2O9]

I used to have spiders in this apartment and once watched in amazement as two of them mated, hanging from their threads, then went back to their respective webs. I didn't want to kill them because they ate the roaches. I tried roach-bombing the apartment but it only killed the spiders.

Chemical insecticides are bad for people and pets, often more harmful than the insects. Boric acid is non-toxic and actually far more effective. I'm a New Yorker so I know cockroaches and the only thing (and I mean ONLY thing) that has worked is boric acid. You put it where you know they walk and it takes a week or two but then they're gone. If you see any after that, they're usually stunned-looking and dying.

BTW flies are intelligent too, and quite rude. I have no qualms killing flies personally but for the roaches I don't want to see them die.

And yeah, if you squash one, clean it up THOROUGHLY. Most of the roaches you see running around are pregnant females looking for a place to establish a new nest. You can often see the egg-sack sticking out of their butt, that means they're ready to go.

I have a weird story involving mice but I haven't found the correct thread for it yet.

 

[fangle]

cockroaches learn quickly!

I had a serious infetstation in my flat. At first it was easy to kill them with a rolled-up newspaper or a shoe, they seemed to be oblivious to the danger, just staring at me while I killed them.
After a while, maybe two or three weeks, they would see me coming and anticipate my actions, swerving and ducking into tight corners where I couldnt reach them.

I had to get the place fumigated professionally. Now after two years they are back and they are smarter and quicker than ever.

 

[zardozzz]

therefore, if you have roaches and u want to control them, DO NOT stamp on them. the best way is to get a geko or use sterilising chemicals (not very green but effective).
.

Geko's is it ? i hate those damn roaches so if we ever had any id have to get a smal army of gekos and let them wander arouind free.

 

[svart]

We used to have to insect bomb our place regularly for roaches but a couple of years ago geckoes moved in and now we only see the odd one, but not for long. I like the geckoes they're cute although they leave their droppings everywhere.

 

[nickedoff12]

You people are lucky.
I've never seen a cockroach in my life -
however, Mosquitoes are insanely clever.

I can't remember how many times I've been outwitted by a mosquito while camping.

 

[ramonmercado]

Cockroaches lose their 'sweet tooth' to evade traps
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22611143
By Victoria Gill
Science reporter, BBC News

Dr Coby Schal: The cockroaches spit out the glucose "like a baby rejects spinach"

A strain of cockroaches in Europe has evolved to outsmart the sugar traps used to eradicate them.

American scientists found that the mutant cockroaches had a "reorganised" sense of taste, making them perceive the glucose used to coat poisoned bait not as sweet but rather as bitter.

A North Carolina State University team tested the theory by giving cockroaches a choice of jam or peanut butter.

They then analysed the insects' taste receptors, similar to our taste buds.

Researchers from the same team first noticed 20 years ago that some pest controllers were failing to eradicate cockroaches from properties, because the insects were simply refusing to eat the bait.

Continue reading the main story
Clever pests

There are about 4,600 species of cockroach and fewer than 30 of these are considered pests. (There are about 5,400 species of mammals)
The world's smallest cockroach is only 0.3mm long and lives in ant nests
The heaviest cockroach is the huge Australian Rhinoceros Cockroach at 8cm in length
Source: Natural History Museum

Dr Coby Schal explained in the journal Science that this new study had revealed the "neural mechanism" behind this refusal.

Jam v peanut butter
In the first part of the experiment, the researchers offered the hungry cockroaches a choice of two foods - peanut butter or glucose-rich jam [known as jelly is the US].

"The jelly contains lots of glucose and the peanut butter has a much smaller amount," explained Dr Schal.

"You can see the mutant cockroaches taste the jelly and jump back - they're repulsed and they swarm over the peanut butter."

In the second part of the experiment, the team was able to find out exactly why the cockroaches were so repulsed.

The scientists immobilised the cockroaches and used tiny electrodes to record the activity of taste receptors - cells that respond to flavour that are "housed" in microscopic hairs on the insects' mouthparts

"The cells that normally respond to bitter compounds were responding to glucose in these [mutant] cockroaches," said Dr Schal.

"So they're perceiving glucose to be a bitter compound.

"The sweet-responding cell does also fire, but the bitter compound actually inhibits it - so the end result is that bitterness overrides sweetness."

Highly magnified footage of these experiments clearly shows a glucose-averse cockroach reacting to a dose of the sugar.

"It behaves like a baby that rejects spinach," explained Dr Schal.

"It shakes its head and refuses to imbibe that liquid, at the end, you can see the [glucose] on the side of the head of the cockroach that has refused it."

Continue reading the main story
Natural selection in action
George Beccaloni
Curator of cockroaches, Natural History Museum
The process of natural selection would strongly favour any chance genetic change that caused a cockroach to avoid the bait and therefore death. Since individuals with the trait would have a greater chance of surviving and reproducing, their descendants with the trait would in time replace those that lacked the trait in the cockroach population.

This is the same process that has led to the evolution of antibiotic resistance in disease-causing bacteria, and warfarin resistance in rats.

The discovery of natural selection was one of the greatest scientific breakthroughs of all time and this year sees worldwide celebrations commemorating the 100th anniversary of the death of Alfred Russel Wallace, the naturalist who co-discovered natural selection with Charles Darwin in 1858.

Natural History Museum: Alfred Russel Wallace's legacy
Dr Elli Leadbeater from the Institute of Zoology in London said the work was exciting.

"Usually, when natural selection changes taste abilities, it simply makes animals more or less sensitive to certain taste types.

"For example, bees that specialise on collecting nectar are less sensitive to sugar than other bees, which means that they only collect concentrated nectar. Evolution has made sugar taste less sweet to them, but they still like it.

"In the cockroach case, sugar actually tastes bitter - an effective way for natural selection to quickly produce cockroaches that won't accept the sugar baits that hide poison."

Dr Schal said this was another chapter in the evolutionary arms race between humans and cockroaches.

"We keep throwing insecticides at them and they keep evolving mechanisms to avoid them," he said.

"I have always had incredible respect for cockroaches," he added. "They depend on us, but they also take advantage of us."

 

[ramonmercado]

US: A cockroach embarrassed a Chicago official in charge of pest control when it took a stroll near him in full view of some aldermen, and its stunt just might have cost it and its buddies their lives.

After a hearing in the city council chambers, fleet and facilities management commissioner David Reynolds had his office call a private contractor to do some exterminating.

The cockroach couldn’t have picked a worse time to show its antenna on the wall of the city council chambers, just as Reynolds was testifying during a budget hearing. Alderman Brendan Reilly wondered aloud how much money in Reynolds’ department budget was devoted to pest control. ...

http://www.irishexaminer.com/world/quir ... 94028.html

 

[ramonmercado]

Holy barnacle! Lobsters and cockroaches are cousins

A decade of genetic data and other evidence has persuaded most researchers that insects and crustaceans, long considered widely separated branches of the arthropod family, actually belong together. The new arthropod tree puts hexapods—six-limbed creatures that include insects, springtails, and silverfish—as closer kin to crabs, lobster, shrimp, and crayfish than those "standard" crustaceans are to others such as seed shrimp. Traditionally, insect and crustacean scientists have taken different approaches, even when they have studied similar problems. Now they are exploring the consequences of the new family tree, and last week at a special symposium of the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, researchers reported new parallels between these two very successful groups of animals and new insights about what it took for an ancient crustacean to give rise to insects.

http://news.sciencemag.org/biology/2015/01/holy-barnacle-lobsters-and-cockroaches-are-cousins

 

[ramonmercado]

I am not just a number, I am a cockroach.

A team of researchers working at Université libre de Bruxelles has found that not only do cockroaches have unique individual personalities, but their differences can also have an impact on group dynamics. In their paper published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the group describes the experiments they conducted as part of their study and why what they learned might help explain why roaches are so good at surviving in different types of environments.

Prior research has shown that humans are not the only ones with unique personalities, other animals such as dogs and cats and many other mammals have been found to behave differently depending on their personality—also, scientists have found that a host of invertebrates also have unique personalities. In this new study the researchers sought to discover if the same was true for cockroaches. ...

http://phys.org/news/2015-02-roaches-individual-personalities-impact-group.html