When I was nine years old, our fourth-grade class pet was a Madagascar hissing cockroach named Billy. I wanted to take him home on weekends, but my mom wasn’t so keen on the idea. To this day, I still carry a torch for Billy the Cockroach. So imagine my surprise when I got older and learned that this creepy-crawly pest wasn’t everyone’s cuddly pet of choice. Even though most of us want to rid our homes of them, these vermin are actually pretty fascinating.
La Cucaracha
Richard Schweid shares some fun facts about these eighteen-kneed ninjas in his book The Cockroach Papers: A Compendium of History and Lore, but these five are particularly intriguing:
- Roaches predate dinosaurs by over 150 million years, and they’ve never altered their design or needed to do so; they’re anatomically perfect in this regard.
- Cockroaches will eat feces, dead humans, sour beer, and even their own young, but they won’t eat cucumbers, which give them gas.
- There are more than five thousand species of roaches, and there may be that many roaming in your apartment at night. They’ll be long gone by the time you turn on the light, though. Cockroaches detect your presence with anal sensors that vibrate in the air when you enter a room.
- They suffer from positive thigmotaxis, an insatiable desire to be touched on all sides. This means that they prefer to be rolling around with their friends, or maybe snugly burrowed in your ear.
- Cockroaches can withstand an atomic bomb blast—at least, better than humans could. Donald Lewis, a professor of entomology at Iowa State University, confirms this conventional wisdom that roaches have a much higher radiation threshold than humans.
Roaches Check In, but They Don’t Check Out
But if you’re one of the many who aren’t awestruck by the fact that cockroaches roamed the planet back when dinosaurs did, and you just want them out of your home and your life, take heart—there are measures you can take to get rid of them. Exterminator Jonathan Hatch says that the most common mistake people make when going after roaches is stomping on them. Besides the obvious mess, cockroaches, when they’re hungry enough, will eat each other’s remains, so the best way to kill them is to dehydrate them.
