Blattodeology (YES, COCKROACHES) with Dominic Evangelista

Dazzling colors. Remote habitats. Gentle parenting. Fantastic genitalia. And yeah, swimming through sewers to surprise you. It’s cockroaches and I promise you will find something to love about them in this chat with cockroach evangelist and Blattodeologist Dr. Dominic Evangelista. Which are the prettiest? Are roaches better at raising kids than you? How do roach scientists feel about the ones in kitchens? How does one catch a cockroach in a dark rainforest? Can roaches pull a Ratatouille and steal our hearts with a casserole? Dominic explains it all. I swear they can be lovable, OKAY?

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alie Ward?

  This episode is sponsored by Seed. Bloating, irregular bowel movement, gas. When your gut is off, it gets your attention. Seed's DS1 is a three-time award-winning probiotic, clinically shown to improve regularity, reduce bloating, and alleviate gas so you can move and eat more freely. Take better care of your gut with Seed. Get 25% off with code 25OLOGIES at seed.com/ologies. These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. We have to say that. How's your ponytail looking? Maybe like a little thinner than it used to? We've talked about this in our menopause episode. At some point, it's bound to happen to all of us.

• 0:44Alie Ward?

  So if you're ready for thicker, fuller hair, start your free online visit today at forhers.com/ologies for personalized care. So that's F-O-R-H-E-R-S.com/ologies. Individual results may vary. Featured products include compounded drug products, which the FDA does not approve or verify for safety, effectiveness, or quality. Prescription required. Price varies based on product and subscription plan. See website for full details, restrictions, and important safety information. Trips are full of unexpected discoveries. Maybe you see a sea slug or you find out that your friend still sleeps with a stuffed animal. But when it comes to your vacation rental, there should not be any surprises. When you book a Verbo vacation rental, if what you expect isn't what you get, Verbo Care has you covered. If something's broken or just not right,

• 1:29Alie Ward?

  Verbo will work to make it right. Plus, you get 24/7 live human support with every booking. Grab your stuffy. We're going on vacay. So book today on the Verbo app. If you know, you're Verbo. Terms apply. See verbo.com/trust for details. Oh, hey. It's the smell of fresh paint in your new apartment. Ally Ward, don't you dare leave. Don't you leave. I'm holding your hand, maybe a little too firmly for you to get away. I'm urging you to be strong. Let's learn about cockroaches. First of all, it's spooktober. All right. Secondly, there's so much to love. Is there? Sort of. Find out with me, a person who, until this interview, knew of very few redeeming qualities of a roach, but now I would have a chat with one

• 2:13Alie Ward?

  if its mouth worked that way. Now, this expert was recommended to me by another ologist, who I adore. And when I told her I needed a cockroach person, she instantly named them. They are an entomology assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. They run a cockroach lab. This guest studied biology for undergrad and ecology and evolution for their PhD. And we'll talk to them about what is a cockroach and why they are not quite what you think they are. But first, just a quick thanks to patrons of the show who submit questions for the ologists ahead of time. Thanks to everyone wearing Ologies merch from ologiesmerch.com. And thanks to everyone who leaves reviews, which help the show so much, such as this crisp new one from Not Abby, who wrote a poem review, "I know nothing,

• 2:57Alie Ward?

  but then I listened to Ologies. Now I know a little something. Ain't that great?" Not Abby.

• 3:04Alie Ward?

  That's me snapping my fingers in an appreciative way. Also, if anyone needs shorter, kid-friendly episodes for their children or classroom safe, we have Smology's, S-M-O-L-O-G-I-E-S. Wherever you get your podcasts, there's a separate feed you can subscribe to. Okay, so first off, the term cockroach comes from the Spanish cucaracha, which stems from cuca for a caterpillar. But in Latin, the word blada means that which shuns the light. So let's shed some light on these low-profile, skittish little critters. Let's learn about their bonkers dicks, their preferred diets, ones that look like emeralds and candy corn,

• 3:44Alie Ward?

  how to catch a rainforest cockroach if you want to, their stunning diversity, why we need cockroaches, in the wild at least, but also how to get them out of your house, how they got there in the first place, and some behavioral aspects that will make you wish you had one as a pal, maybe a pet, with entomologist, assistant professor, and professional blatodiatologist, Dr. Dominic Evangelista.

• 4:26Speaker 01

  My name is Dominic Evangelista and I use he/him pronouns.

• 4:29Alie Ward?

  Blatyodiologist, would we say?

• 4:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, I registered the email [email protected] like 10 years ago, but I've never used it.

• 4:37Alie Ward?

  Nice. Can people email you their thoughts and questions about cockroaches? No, you're like, don't.

• 4:46Speaker 01

  I know what most of them will be, so I don't want those questions, but sure.

• 4:50Alie Ward?

  Are those questions, how do I get all these roaches out of my refrigerator?

• 4:54Speaker 01

  Yes, pretty much. That's like 70% of them.

• 4:57Alie Ward?

  And there's only 10 species of cockroaches, really, that we cohabitate with, correct? Out of thousands of species in the world?

• 5:06Speaker 01

  That's about right, yeah. I don't know, somewhere between 10 and 20, maybe. So the vast majority of cockroach species, you will never come into contact with. They live out in the forests, in the deserts, in the grasslands of our planet, and they do not want to come into contact with humans. Those like, kind of 10 species that we might come across in our homes, give a bad reputation to all of them.

• 5:29Alie Ward?

  Maybe we should just start with what even is a cockroach? Because I think people probably think there's just the ones that they've seen on TV, or maybe like in their dorm room.

• 5:39Speaker 01

  My sense is that when people hear the word cockroach, they have an image in their head of one, maybe two species. Either Periplaneta americanana, the American cockroach, or Latella germanica, the German cockroach. By the way, those cockroaches are not originally from America or Germany.

• 5:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, so like, for Periplaneta americanana, that's like the Wali roach. That's the big brown one that most people are probably familiar with. And Latella germanica is the tiny little... Amber light colored one with black stripes. Those are just two species cockroaches. We we know of about 7,000 species of cockroaches. There's probably like three times as many as that in the world.

• 6:25Alie Ward?

  So 99.904% of cockroaches will never be in your toaster or your building's boiler room. Their species, not interested. So where are they then? All those roaches that we never hear about?

• 6:40Speaker 01

  The vast majority of those are in tropical and subtropical latitudes. So tropical rainforests mostly. But there's also a lot of species in deserts and some species in temperate ecosystems as well. There's also termites, which are subterranean cockroaches.

• 6:58Alie Ward?

  That's like a new rebrand, isn't it?

• 7:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's only within the last 20 years that it was somewhat official that termites are actually just fancy cockroaches.

• 7:09Alie Ward?

  And yes, in 2007, the paper came out boldly announcing, "The Death of an Order: A Comprehensive Molecular Philogenic Study Confirms That Termites Are Usocial Cockroaches." And this study noted that our molecular analyses, the most comprehensive yet attempted, show that termites are social cockroaches, no longer meriting being classified as a separate order from the cockroaches. Instead, we propose that they should be treated as a family of cockroaches. And it continues with the backstory that termites, cockroaches, and mantids form a well-established lineage, uniquely defined by having a perforation in essentially what is their skull and enclosing their eggs in a specialized case called an uuthika.

• 7:54Alie Ward?

  So yeah, you got termites? You got some wood-eating roaches. Congrats.

• 7:58Speaker 02

  Oh, fancy, fancy.

• 8:01Alie Ward?

  But do other cockroaches live in that kind of social structure? Is that one thing that sets them apart from other types of cockroaches? Or do a lot of cockroaches have that division of labor?

• 8:11Speaker 01

  So no, only termites are what we call eusocial. They only, only termites live in those highly organized societies with different castes and a queen and a king. Other cockroaches, they do have levels of sociality, but not to that highly advanced, organized level that termites do. So there are some cockroaches that we would call subsocial. There are cockroaches that are more solitary. And then there's everything in between. So there's lots of species that provide different levels of parental care, including some of them that have small colonies where maybe burrows in wood or in soil that are guarded by matriarch.

• 8:52Alie Ward?

  And yes, a French 2009 study titled "The Weight of the Clan: Even in Insects, Social Isolation Can Induce a Behavioral Syndrome" found that like some vertebrate organisms, German cockroaches reared among 10 siblings fared better in life than ones raised in complete solitude, which suffered from reduced appetites and less exploration of their surroundings. They were shy, roaches if you will, and they were bad at flirting. But roaches also take restaurant recommendations from each other. They prefer to have dinner companions when enjoying a food source before they all move on to enjoy another nearby snack.

• 9:33Alie Ward?

  And this was evidenced in the 2010 paper "Collective Foraging Decision in Gregarious Insect." And yeah, they are great parents. Well, better than me, but that's because I don't have any children.

• 9:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, so there's lots of different levels of sociality among cockroaches.

• 9:48Alie Ward?

  What makes a cockroach a cockroach then?

• 9:51Speaker 01

  Good question. So first, let's talk about what's not cockroaches. So praying mantises are the sister group to cockroaches. So they're the closest relatives to cockroaches. So what makes cockroaches different from praying mantises? Cockroaches have a leathery egg case. So whereas mantises lay their eggs in this sort of like foamy egg case on plant matter, Cockroaches create this like little leathery, it looks like a purse.

• 10:22Alie Ward?

  Hmm.

• 10:22Speaker 01

  That they stick their eggs into.

• 10:23Alie Ward?

  So yeah, cockroaches make themselves some nice handbags. They craft them with their genitals and they're stuffed to the zipper with their own children. And I picture cockroach moms birthing an oothika like Miranda Priestly slamming a handbag on a desk in The Devil Wears Prada. These ladies are loathed, feared, but also respected and a city girl and cosmopolitan to the core. But out in the wild, of course, they are living all kinds of varied lives, but still they emerge into the world from mommy's vagina purse.

• 10:58Speaker 01

  So that's one defining feature of cockroaches. Another one is less obvious. They have this endosymbiotic bacteria that lives inside of their fat cells. And there's some other sort of less well-defined characters that you can use to identify a cockroach, like cockroaches are flat.

• 11:17Alie Ward?

  Mm hmm.

• 11:18Speaker 01

  They're kind of oval shaped. They have a shield-like thing that covers their head. A lot of people think it is their head, but actually the head is underneath this shield-like thing at the front of their bodies.

• 11:31Alie Ward?

  Oh, so this is the dorsal sclerite of the prothorax of an insect, but you can call it the pronotum if you're feeling casual. Also, if you are a person who likes, say, heavy metal and cockroaches, you might enjoy the death's head cockroach, which is an easy one to rear and it has red and black markings on its pronotum. What if you got a roach pet? What if it was your new bestie? What if? I'm as someone who really loves bugs and has had a praying mantis pet and I don't think I realized that about cockroaches, that they have an awning.

• 12:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, they do, yeah, an awning. It's a good way to put it.

• 12:11Alie Ward?

  What are those little finger-like things that stick out from their butt? The sercy?

• 12:15Speaker 01

  Cercy. I say sercy.

• 12:18Alie Ward?

  Okay.

• 12:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, so sercy are pretty big in cockroaches.

• 12:23Alie Ward?

  So these are the pointy things on their butts that look like two little tiny rump antenna, which can sense low vibrations or gusts of air. Evolutionary biologists think these appendages help them escape predators.

• 12:36Speaker 01

  I think most insects have them, but they're smaller than a lot of other insects, whereas in cockroaches they're quite large. As far as I know, they are sensory organs and they may also produce or be involved in like pheromone or hormonal production.

• 12:52Alie Ward?

  So yes, sensory organs. It's like you having a nose or eyes right on your hiney. We hate to see you leave, but you can smell us as you go. Can your butt do that? I don't think so, baby. I feel like you're mentioning praying mantis. And if a praying mantis lands on your shoulder, it's like, ooh, good luck, you know? You see a cricket and you go, oh cricket, get out of here. But they both look a little like cockroaches, but obviously we're just not used to interfacing with cockroaches in a way that is benign. But when they're out in the world, like when they're living in their actual usual habitat and they're not imported into cities and such, are they using that little flat body to scoot under bark?

• 13:36Alie Ward?

  They're hanging out in leaves like other like burrowing habitats? Like why that flat, round body?

• 13:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a great question.

• 13:44Alie Ward?

  Thank you.

• 13:45Speaker 01

  So that's sort of like cockroach's superpower is hiding, escaping predators or being in little nooks and crannies because that's where it's nice and, you know, moist and humid. So this is probably something that they inherited from their ancestors. So if we go way back to like the Carboniferous era, there were a lot of insects on the planet that looked cockroach-like. They were not modern cockroaches, but they still had that like flat body. They had that shield, the awning that we mentioned before. They had similar wings and then praying mantises and cockroaches derived from insects that looked like that and cockroaches retain that flat body.

• 14:30Alie Ward?

  Hmm, okay. And they move so fast. Do they all move fast in in the forest, in subtropical regions? Are can they haul ass like that naturally? Or is that just something that they're evading a shoe?

• 14:45Speaker 01

  I mean, it's mostly it's mostly evading shoes or evading predators when they move that fast. But yeah, they do move fast and most of them do. You know, my graduate students and I, when we're out in the field, that's what makes fieldwork fun for us is that it's like a challenge. With other insects, you know, you catch them with traps or with nets. By far, the best way to catch cockroaches is with your hands, with your just bare, human paws. And it takes a lot of like accuracy, precision and speed because these these little tiny things, some of which are only a couple of millimeters long, and they move very, very fast.

• 15:21Alie Ward?

  How do you even see it? Do you all have magnifying scopes on? Like, how do you see these little ones?

• 15:28Speaker 01

  You just got to get used to it. You just got to like, train your body to recognize, oh, that's a cockroach. Or sometimes it's like you grab it and you're like, oh, that was just a spot on a leaf. That wasn't actually a bug.

• 15:39Alie Ward?

  And how little are the littlest ones and how big are the biggest ones?

• 15:44Speaker 01

  Pretty big range in size. The smallest cockroaches are about two millimeters long.

• 15:50Alie Ward?

  Oh, little.

• 15:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, and there's a couple of different tiny ones. One of the cutest tiny cockroaches is called Ataphila fungicola. They are a cockroach that lives with leaf cutter ants. They like attach onto the bodies of leaf cutter ants and sort of like hang around them.

• 16:07Alie Ward?

  No.

• 16:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:09Alie Ward?

  Do they ride them like little ponies?

• 16:10Speaker 01

  I think they do, yeah. You can find pictures of it online.

• 16:14Alie Ward?

  You can find pictures online, and I did. And this little cutie does in fact live with ants and they do ride them like ponies, sometimes right on top of their heads, and they look like a little brown beret. And if you're ready to get obsessed, you can take a gander at the 2021 study by Dr. Zachary Phillips. Titled "Emigrating Together, But Not Establishing Together: A Cockroach Rides Ants and Leaves", which explains that the Attila fungicola miniature cockroach that lives in the nests of Texas leaf cutter ants hitchhikes on their winged queens, and it happens during their nuptial flight. And I also happened upon Dr. Phillips's study in its dissertation form. I was reading through it, and in the intro, Dr. Phillips states that "if it weren't for

• 16:56Alie Ward?

  those meddling cockroaches, I would have studied bees and soils." Thank you, cockroaches. You are not meddling. That was a lie. You are an inspiration. Finally, it concludes, "I owe everything to my family and friends. None of you are going to read this dissertation, not even this acknowledgement, but I forgive you." And Dr. Phillips also dedicated the dissertation in part two, Cafe Medici, and I looked that up, and it's a coffee shop in Austin, near the university. And I hope someone there knows that they are name checked in a paper about roaches flying on queens like a fever dream.

• 17:28Speaker 01

  And the largest cockroaches are some of the largest insects. So the largest one in terms of wingspan is Megaloblada, my appropriate name.

• 17:38Alie Ward?

  That means big cockroach.

• 17:39Speaker 01

  It's about the size of, I don't know, I have a pretty big hand, about the size of my hand, when its wings are spread out. And the largest one in terms of weight is the Australian burrowing cockroach. And they're, yeah, about the size of like a closed fist. And then every, every range of size in between.

• 17:57Alie Ward?

  And when it comes to you, you haven't been chasing cockroaches in the rainforest your whole life. Did you start down an insect nerd path? It's hard to find a good cockroach expert, and you are one of the finest. So how did that happen?

• 18:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, when I was a kid, I loved animals. I loved the, just the diversity and the surprising nature of like weird animals or interesting animals. I was, I started off being interested in evolutionary biology. I wouldn't have said it at the time, but it gave sort of spiritual meaning to the world around me. From there, it just, it kind of happened. I just kept exploring the world of evolution of animals. I ended up in a lab with Jessica Ware, who's a, I guess, a previous Ologies guest, where she, I went into her lab and she said, okay, do you want to work with dragonflies, termites, or cockroaches?

• 18:52Speaker 01

  Everyone was already working on dragonflies and I wanted to be different. So I was like, all right, I'll do cockroaches, not knowing anything about any of these. And that's, yeah, that's, that's why I got into it, just trying to be different, trying to do things that other people don't want to do necessarily.

• 19:07Alie Ward?

  For more on Dr. Jessica Ware, you can listen to our odontology episode on dragonflies. Although odontology is the study of teeth. And yeah, I do owe you that episode. I swear I'm going to do it. Where are you based now? And did you come from like a city or kind of a rural background?

• 19:24Speaker 01

  Grew up around New York City. Um, I lived most of my life around, around New York City. Uh, and I'm currently at the University of Illinois, which is in Champaign, in the middle of, dead center of the Midwest.

• 19:36Alie Ward?

  Were you pretty quickly surprised by the diversity of them? Were you already aware?

• 19:42Speaker 01

  I guess I kind of start off with the default assumption that insects are just always weird and surprising and diverse. I am still surprised a lot of times by how diverse cockroaches are. There's a cockroach in, in India that has these like devil horns. There's cockroaches in South America that have these divots in their shield and make their shield look really like some kind of like war mask.

• 20:07Alie Ward?

  So when Dominic observes these forest roaches in the field, he says that they get around essentially like an Olympic level American ninja warrior. They're just maneuvering deftly to evade him. They're using speed, acrobatics, U-turns. Now, if you've seen a cockroach, let's say a city roach, you may have noticed its giant amber colored wings, or maybe you've seen the smaller kind of crickety German roaches or a dark glossy one that might look wingless, but has nubbins for wings, kind of like the arms of a Mighty T-Rex. What are they doing there?

• 20:45Speaker 01

  But lots of cockroaches have those very short nubby wings and we don't know why. That's actually one of the research questions that my lab is working on. My graduate student Johanna is doing a deep dive into wing evolution and wing reduction in cockroaches. And it has happened many, many times. It may have to do with both flight and also evolution driven for sexual selection for mating because they cockroaches use their wings for both of those things.

• 21:15Alie Ward?

  Wait, how do they use their wings for mating?

• 21:17Speaker 01

  Great question. My friend and collaborator, Susanna, who's a researcher in the Czech Republic, has done work on this. The males use their wings to position the female on their abdomen, you know, while they're doing their little mating dance.

• 21:35Speaker 01

  One of my favorite things about cockroaches is why the males are positioning the females on their abdomen. Because the males offer a copulatory gift to the females.

• 21:47Alie Ward?

  Oh.

• 21:48Speaker 01

  Yes, so cute, right? This copulatory gift.

• 21:52Speaker 01

  What's so interesting about this copulatory gift is that it's made exclusively of urine. So.

• 21:58Alie Ward?

  Oh.

• 21:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's beautiful. So actually, as far as I can tell, cockroaches are the only animals other than humans that give sexual golden showers.

• 22:11Speaker 01

  It's really like important to their biology. There's these like extravagant glands. They've like adapted these very ornate structures for amplifying this behavior for attracting females using their urates and having females feed on their urates for longer.

• 22:29Alie Ward?

  Now, you may be thinking, surely another animal must partake in the golden shower of courtships. And technically, you are correct. So in the 2023 paper, Flamin' Ostophagia and Other Behaviors of Giraffes: Bummer Nasal Organ Adaptation, the giraffe research team of doctors Lynette Hart and Benjamin Hart explain that males, this is a quote, males provoke females to urinate by sniffing and prodding them. If the female is going to urinate, she first widens her hind-like stance and sets a stable posture and then urinates. So this has been described by onlookers as gargling her sweet, sweet piss to figure out if she is the one

• 23:13Alie Ward?

  and would be amenable to carrying his baby. And yes, we need a giraffe episode because I really need to ask these doctors, Hart, who are married, what their deal is, the giraffes and also them. But back to cockroaches enjoying a dinner date of crystal urine, which looks kind of like coarse coffee grounds or like little mouse droppings, but more romantic. Now, is this because in in rainforests, sodium is a premium? Are they getting electrolytes from that?

• 23:44Speaker 01

  It's actually a protein.

• 23:46Alie Ward?

  Oh.

• 23:46Speaker 01

  So another, this is another superpower of cockroaches. The reason why we expel urine is because that's ammonia. That's like metabolic waste. Our bodies cannot use that. In fact, it's toxic to us. But I mentioned earlier that cockroaches, one of their defining features is they have these endosymbiotic bacteria. And these endosymbiotic bacteria give them this superpower where they can take urates, which are normally a waste product, and recycle them.

• 24:13Alie Ward?

  Oh.

• 24:13Speaker 01

  So they can recycle them and reuse them and create new amino acids from them. So cockroaches don't actually pee. They just, or they pee very little. They just secrete that those urates and they recycle them.

• 24:27Alie Ward?

  That's so wild to me that part of what defines a cockroach is the endosymbionts. Like, part of who you are is what you've got living with you, kind of?

• 24:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, in this case, like, it seems to be so integral to their biology because they're literally, it's literally within the cells. Like, it's almost like a new, like, type of mitochondria.

• 24:48Alie Ward?

  Really? And it's made of a bacterium, of a virus? What exactly are those, endosymbionts?

• 24:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, so they're they're called appropriately bladder bacterium, cockroach bacterium.

• 25:01Alie Ward?

  So a 2024 study titled Frequent and Asymmetric Cell Division in Endosymbiotic Bacteria of Cockroaches described that these bladder bacteria, which can help digest that extra uric acid too.

• 25:14Alie Ward?

  Divide at really frequent and in wonky ways and have been with cockroaches for over 140 million years. So they have a good thing going. And if you're wondering, by the way, why people call cockroaches palmetto bugs, that's because there's a wood cockroach. It lives down in Florida, Southeastern United States. They love palmetto trees. And sometimes, yeah, one might wander into people's houses. And it's just easier for people to call all roaches palmetto bugs, because denial is a very effective drug. What about their behavior? Do they tend to be nocturnal?

• 25:52Speaker 01

  Most of them are nocturnal. Yeah.

• 25:54Alie Ward?

  Oh, okay.

• 25:54Speaker 01

  During the day, they'll be in looks and crannies and they will come out sometimes at night. There are diurnal cockroaches. Typically, when you see like a colorful cockroach, I think our assumption is that most of the time those are diurnal.

• 26:11Alie Ward?

  Hmm.

• 26:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. If you ever see a picture of a pretty cockroach, which there is a lot of them, it's probably a diurnal species.

• 26:17Alie Ward?

  What are some of the prettiest? I know there's a domino roach, which is so cute and looks so much like the beetle that it mimics. What are some other just stunners?

• 26:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a couple of beetle mimic cockroaches that are really cool. One of them is prosoplecta, which is found in Southeast Asia. They look like leaf beetles. There's Meliroidia magnifica, which is emerald green and ruby red, like very bright. It's also mimicking a beetle. There's a couple of species or groups that are like metallic colored. Cory di-daram, that one, I think, is sometimes colorful. There's also a lot of like Madagascar hissing cockroaches. A lot of cockroaches have these like warts horns on their shield. Those can have like cool and interesting pattern, color patterns on them.

• 27:07Alie Ward?

  I mean, Meliroidia magnifica.

• 27:10Alie Ward?

  Which mimics blister beetles with this cherry red head and a metallic green body. Are you shitting me? Polystereia michelli, you blue and yellow armored beauty. I know why they call you the Mardi Gras cockroach, because I want to party with you. Pseudoglomerous magnifica, also known as the emerald cockroach, which looks like a futuristic domed car in this stunning, deep, iridescent, periodo color. Domino cockroach? You polka dotted joker, you're cutest hell. And for more examples, I will direct you to the 2016 Smithsonian article by Jason Patel, which is titled, "I'm Officially in Love with Cockroaches." Roaches, they leave no crumbs. What are they out there eating?

• 27:52Alie Ward?

  I once walked by an apple core on a summer's evening, and it was absolutely lousy with roaches. And I said, "Ah, I bet they're loving that right now."

• 28:02Speaker 01

  Where were you?

• 28:02Alie Ward?

  Where was it?

• 28:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:04Alie Ward?

  I was in Los Feliz, walking down the sidewalk, LA, hot. We got hot nights, and when it's hot out, the roaches are out. And they're skidding around, and they're saying, "What's this? A pizza crust? I'm in love." And you just go, "Get it." It was like jackals around a carcass, this apple core. It was like definitely the watering hole of the evening. But what are they out there usually eating? Are they breaking down a lot of leaf litter? What are they munching on?

• 28:34Speaker 01

  Great question. So for the most of them, we really don't know. We have like no idea. We can guess, though, one that you saw munching on the apple was probably a pest roach. And we think that they probably just have very general diets. They'll just eat whatever's around. There are some cockroaches that we think probably get a lot of nutrition from bat quanno, like a lot of the cave dwelling species or the species that live in hollow trees. There are some species that specialize entirely on wood, not just termites, but the relatives of termites, as well as other cockroaches feed on wood. There are some that largely getting a lot of nutrition from fungus. They're feeding on fungus. And actually, it might be that fungus is super important to a lot of their diets,

• 29:18Speaker 01

  since almost all cockroaches are detritivores, we think, so.

• 29:24Speaker 01

  The fungus growing on dead stuff might be an important nutritional component to their diet. There's also some species that we think are pollinators, are drinking nectar, feeding on like garbage at the base or inside of birds' nests, not like, you know, bird garbage, not human garbage.

• 29:40Alie Ward?

  Yeah, yeah, they can be nature's cleanup crews, though, right?

• 29:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 29:44Alie Ward?

  What about when they are not foraging, but rather being served by their captive humans, such as a grad student in a lab? The 2006 paper Food Preference in Feeding Behavior of the German Cockroach offered up several meal options to cockroaches and found that their favorites were banana and potato. But unlike me, they can deal with not snacking because our roach friends can live for weeks without water and nearly two months with no food, which is an intermittent fasting window so long, even Jesus couldn't hang with it. Oh, and yes, they can also live a week without a head, which is not something that John the Baptist can do. And yeah, I did Google biblical beheadings, looking for a parallel. And honestly, there was no shortage to choose from.

• 30:27Alie Ward?

  I think that when we're talking about pest species, we hear that they can survive a nuclear attack. I have heard that they can eat a fingernail and live like a month off of that. Like, how, when they're our roommates, like, how tough are they? How badass are they?

• 30:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was just talking to some of my colleagues today about this, that we have, we have cockroaches in our building, and this is probably no way to get rid of them. Like, we can keep the numbers down, but they're not going anywhere because they just have so many places to hide. Eventually, they'll find food. We can, we can keep the floors clean and, and, you know, clean up after ourselves, but eventually they'll find some kind of food, whether it's like the glue holding a book binding together or just dead skin. They can't survive just on that stuff, but, you know, they could eat anything for the most part. They seem indestructible because we try to get rid of them and they just won't go away. They need us, those pest cockroaches, they probably need us because the, you know,

• 31:29Speaker 01

  the American cockroach, our classic pest cockroach, is pretty much everywhere, but it's not out in nature for the most part.

• 31:36Alie Ward?

  Really? Yeah.

• 31:37Speaker 01

  It's sticking to human habitations.

• 31:40Alie Ward?

  It loves us.

• 31:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:42Alie Ward?

  It needs us. You mentioned that German cockroaches do not come from Germany. Uh, American cockroaches, not from North America. I'm wondering about the Oriental cockroach, which also, I'm not sure, nominoculture, it seems outdated. I don't know if anyone's working on that or not. Where are they initially from?

• 31:59Speaker 01

  So this was a little bit debated. The American cockroach probably came from Africa, somewhere in Africa. The German cockroach, I think is from Southeast Asia.

• 32:11Alie Ward?

  So the so-called Oriental cockroach, or Blata orientalis, comes from the word for eastern roach. And it is a misnomer, because these dark water lovers are really from the region of Crimea. Now, the females have little cute winglets, and they don't work. And the males have kind of a three-quarter sleeve look with some shortened wings. Also, if you absolutely cannot hang with roaches, maybe try somewhere colder. Although I did fact-check this just now. Just on a whim, I yelped cockroach exterminators in Anchorage, and yeah, they do have them up there, too.

• 32:47Speaker 01

  And we think that they've probably been with us for a very long time.

• 32:50Alie Ward?

  They're kind of like tiny wolves, right? They're just like hanging out in the garbage pile, being like, what do you got? And now they're just roommates.

• 32:57Speaker 01

  Unfortunately.

• 33:00Alie Ward?

  Part of the family. Is it weird for you, as someone who studies and loves roaches, to have to do abatement in your workplace? And is there a good humane way to keep them from reproducing? Because obviously, people do want to appreciate them, but just not in such proximity.

• 33:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I don't like pest cockroaches either.

• 33:22Alie Ward?

  Okay.

• 33:24Speaker 01

  I was doing fieldwork like two years ago, and I was in a very bad hotel. And I got woken up in the middle of the night because there was a cockroach biting like my lower back. And I was not happy about that.

• 33:33Alie Ward?

  No, no. They do that? They bite?

• 33:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, they bite. I mean, it doesn't hurt really, but like, it was enough to like wake me up, like, oh, what is that? Yeah, and so like, I don't like cockroaches either. I have a lot of. Compassion for people that are dealing with infestations because some of them can be very, very bad. And yeah, kill them.

• 33:54Alie Ward?

  What is a good, is it, is the Borax method good for that? Well, I've, I feel like spraying your living area and raid is not going to be effective, other than just killing the one that you've doused.

• 34:05Speaker 01

  The things that I would normally recommend are just clean up as much, as best you can. Try to close any little gaps, especially in plumbing that are leading into the place where the infestation is and run a dehumidifier.

• 34:22Alie Ward?

  Oh.

• 34:22Speaker 01

  After you do all of that, because cockroaches are not very good at retaining water. So they dry out pretty quickly. So tho- those things might not kill an infestation, but it could significantly reduce.

• 34:35Alie Ward?

  You mentioned plumbing. How are they surviving in pipes and not drowning now? Like, how do they crawl out of a shower drain when you're like, I was just running that?

• 34:46Speaker 01

  Well, cockroaches, particularly the American cockroach is pretty water resistant and they can swim.

• 34:52Alie Ward?

  Oh.

• 34:53Speaker 01

  They don't probably want to be swimming, but they can. And their cuticle is pretty water repellent.

• 34:58Alie Ward?

  This is also why some folks call cockroaches water bugs, because they can crawl upside down on like the dry ceiling inside a pipe. They can do some swimming. They can come through cracks in sewer lines, just burst in into your life on a slip and slide.

• 35:14Speaker 01

  They can probably get through short distances of water pretty easily.

• 35:19Alie Ward?

  Most cockroaches though, do they breathe through spiracles on the side of their body? Where are they taking in air? What's the guts like?

• 35:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, they, they use spiracles. They, you know, will expand and contract their abdomen to bring air in and out of their abdominal spiracles, which are little holes at the sides of their bodies.

• 35:38Alie Ward?

  In terms of the guts of a roach, Dominic is pretty neutral about their anatomy. Well,

• 35:44Speaker 01

  Except for their genitalia, which are fantastic.

• 35:47Alie Ward?

  What's going on there?

• 35:48Speaker 01

  Um, so yeah, cockroaches have, the males have these really complex and ornate genitalia that are asymmetrical. So cockroaches, like most other animals, are bilaterally symmetrical, but their genitalia are totally different on the left and right. There's like a part for hooking the female and preparing her for the rest of the genitalia to go in. There's a part that looks like a, like this complicated, three dimensional clamp like structure. There's another part that like usually has a series of spines that may be used for scraping out uh sperm from previous mating events.

• 36:25Alie Ward?

  Oh, yeah.

• 36:26Speaker 01

  Some parts that might be like a mating plug. There's like so much variability in genitalia. There's really very little we know about how they actually work. I think, I think people should make art based on cockroach genitalia. They're so ornate.

• 36:42Alie Ward?

  Just architectural gorgeous.

• 36:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:45Alie Ward?

  And so useful too. They've had so much time to evolve. And actually, people had questions about evolution. Can I ask questions from some listeners?

• 36:55Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 36:56Alie Ward?

  So yeah, roaches, they are packing some pretty weird looking asymmetrical heat. And now you know why there's so many of them. They are out there making love. But before we get to your questions, let's take a quick break to donate to a cause of the ologist's choosing. And this week, Dr. Evangelista selected Teach for America, which is a network of more than 70,000 leaders who started in the classroom and remain in lifelong pursuit of the vision that one day all children will have the opportunity to attain an excellent education. And we're also going to donate to the wonderful entomologists of color at Ento P O C. And Dr. Evangelista is a founding member of that org, whose mission is to diversify entomology and help support people of color or P O C members of the entomology community.

• 37:39Alie Ward?

  You can head to ento P O C dot org to learn more or to donate. And thank you to sponsors of the show for making those two donations possible.

• 37:48Alie Ward?

  How's your ponytail looking? Maybe like a little thinner than it used to? We've talked about this in our menopause episode. At some point, it's bound to happen to all of us. So if you're ready for thicker, fuller hair, start your free online visit today at forhers.com/ologies for personalized care. So that's F-O-R-H-E-R-S dot com slash ologies. Individual results may vary. Featured products include compounded drug products, which the FDA does not approve or verify for safety, effectiveness, or quality. Prescription required. Price varies based on product and subscription plan. See website for full details, restrictions, and important safety information. This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. If you haven't heard me gushing about Squarespace for years, it's an all-in-one website platform. Whether you're trying to grow a business you have

• 38:33Alie Ward?

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• 39:17Alie Ward?

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• 40:55Alie Ward?

  All right, let's scuttle into the mailbag and eat some envelope glue, even though these questions were submitted by patrons electronically via patreon.com/ologies, which you two can join for $1. But yeah, moving along, how do they move along? Patrons, Dr. Lena Carpenter, Rosie Clark, Indy Pepper, Chris F., wanted to know... Let's actually talk about locomotion because Marissa Asher wanted to know, "Why are they so bad at walking? The size freaks me out, but more than anything, the way they stumble around depletes all my bravery when it comes to trying to kill the things." And others wanted to know why they're so fast. Eva Berger says, "I grew up in Georgia and I swear cockroaches fly. My question is, can they really fly or do they just glide?" So

• 41:40Alie Ward?

  yeah, why are they bad at walking, good at running? Are they flying? What's happening?

• 41:47Speaker 01

  I don't get the "bad at walking" thing. I think they're pretty good at walking.

• 41:50Alie Ward?

  Okay.

• 41:51Speaker 01

  And yeah, they are super fast. So maybe if someone saw a cockroach that's bad at walking, that may have been a beetle.

• 41:59Alie Ward?

  Do they have really good joints? Are they just like, "Whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop", because they really... Speed walking.

• 42:06Speaker 01

  They're super fast. Their legs are just optimized for sprinting. Right? They're sprinters. And there's some cool like slow motion video on YouTube of cockroaches running and how they how they coordinate their legs and how they move their legs. And as they find a ledge, they kind of drag their hind legs and their hind legs will like latch on to the ledge and they'll like flip around and go underneath. They're agile runners as well as flyers. So yeah, regarding that, do they fly? Do they glide? Both. Some of the bigger ones are probably not the most graceful flyers. They probably flutter a lot and may not be able to gain much altitude, but they do have pretty big wings. Yeah, we have evidence suggesting that cockroaches can fly

• 42:51Speaker 01

  multiple miles at a time.

• 42:53Alie Ward?

  What?

• 42:54Speaker 01

  If that freaks out some of the listeners out there, they but these are the forest cockroaches I'm talking about. So the pest cockroaches are not very good at flying. They will flutter. If you ever want to know if a cockroach is good at flying, just pick it up and throw it in the air and see what it does.

• 43:15Alie Ward?

  Easier said than done, perhaps?

• 43:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:19Alie Ward?

  You know, I have heard that pest cockroaches that come in, a lot of times will come in if you don't have an infestation and you see like one of the American cockroaches, which takes longer to breed, it's likely that they just hitched a ride from a box. So if you're like a real online shopper, you've got a lot of boxes in your entryway, you might have some stowaways.

• 43:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. I think that's probably how they get around most of the time because, like I said before, like they don't want to stray too far from human habitations. So the way they're getting around is like through sewers, any kind of hidden tunnels underneath buildings and through like us moving them around in potted plants or boxes on Amazon. Yeah.

• 44:03Alie Ward?

  But you mentioned cleanliness, and I'm glad that you did. Chrisless, Ashton, Riley, GJ Wyatt, Keenan Daly, Mindy Corker and Turley, Austin Johnson, The Tangle System, Meg is Me, Greg Wallach, and Jaws Theme Swimming. Asked, Austin Johnson asked, will you settle some flim flam? I'm hearing they're clean, I'm hearing they're not. Which is it? GJ Wyatt said, I've heard that they aren't a sign of things being dirty per se, but they are as clean or dirty as their surroundings. GJ Wyatt says, I'm a little curious about them because I've never seen one IRL. And I'm like, what planet are you living on that you've never seen a roach in real life? Who among us hasn't dated a musician with a roach infestation? You know what I mean? Who among us?

• 44:47Alie Ward?

  I guess some people, but what about their cleanliness? Are they cleaning their antenna all the time? What are they doing?

• 44:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're constantly grooming themselves. Their antenna, their legs, they are constantly grooming themselves. You know, they can't groom their whole bodies. But I think they do also have antimicrobial properties on their exoskeleton.

• 45:07Alie Ward?

  Yes, it is true. And if you don't believe me, you can curl up with the 2023 study, Cockroaches: A Potential Source of Novel Bioactive Molecules for the Benefit of Human Health, which gushes. Cockroaches are one of the hardiest insects that have survived on this planet for millions of years. It says, they continue, they thrive in unhygienic environments and are able to survive without food for up to 30 days, without air for around 45 minutes, and being submerged underwater for half an hour. They can endure doses of radiation 15 times greater than humans. And then the researchers ponder that. It is intriguing that cockroaches are able to endure and flourish under conditions that are harmful to Homo sapiens.

• 45:49Alie Ward?

  We postulate that the cockroach gut microbiome and/or its metabolites may be contributing to their Their hardiness, which should be utilized for the discovery of biologically active molecules for the benefit of human health. So yeah, doctors are looking to cockroaches with stars in their eyes, money in their dreams, thinking cockroaches. How do they do it? And where can I get me some of that? But now back to the city filth.

• 46:15Speaker 01

  For the most part, I would say pest cockroaches, if they're around, they have to be eating something. So that might mean that there might be some food for them around, which might be crumbs, food waste or mold, even if it's not visible, might be there for them. And basically, if you cough on a cockroach and that cockroach walks on someone's sandwich, then you just coughed on their sandwich.

• 46:37Alie Ward?

  Oh.

• 46:37Speaker 01

  But that's, that's not the cockroach's fault. That's your fault for

• 46:41Alie Ward?

  Right.

• 46:41Speaker 01

  coughing on the cockroach. They're not like inherently dirty, but just like anything else that moves around and interacts with this environment, it might pick up some things.

• 46:50Alie Ward?

  Right. So if they're using the sewer as a commuting channel, then blame the sewer, not the roaches. They're just walking where they gotta walk. But you mentioned coughing on one and getting close enough to cough on one. Blair C., Justin Bowen and Britt Carpenter had a question about their smells. Justin Bowen said, my wife wants to know why they smell like they do. I want to know why she's been so close to them that she knows what they smell like. And Justin, that seems like a conversation you need to have with your wife. But do they have an odor when they're squished? If they're squished?

• 47:24Speaker 01

  They do smell. They do smell kind of musty. And I smell them most. And there's a lot of them, like in a container, because we have a lot of cockroaches in containers here in the entomology department. When you open up those containers, there's a distinct musty kind of smell. I think it's mostly from their pheromones and some of them have like a very strong smell. So like Uri codis, which is a genus of cockroach that is found in the tropics, but also like in Florida, they're called skunk roaches because they stink. They say smell kind of like stink bugs.

• 47:58Alie Ward?

  If you have not had the pleasure of a stink bug whiff, let me give you some adjectives to imagine in terms of cockroach smell. I have read that they smell musty, like a basement or old wood. They smell like a combination of B O and mold, rancid oil, wet dog and/or burnt hair. Now that's when they're alive, but dead, they smell worse.

• 48:22Alie Ward?

  Sorry. Maybe not all of them appetizing, but

• 48:25Speaker 01

  Definitely.

• 48:26Alie Ward?

  Yeah. Adri Houdak, Julia Loves Fun Facts, Clouds, Bugs and Shrooms, Leo Shang, Kaphoria's Classroom, and Madeline Fox wanted to know, Clouds, Bugs and Shrooms asked, what do they taste like? I want one in my mouth. Julia Loves Fun Facts says, could we eat them like people eat crickets? Do people eat them in different parts of the world? Could we eat them if we farmed them?

• 48:50Speaker 01

  I do believe they're used as like a medicinal remedy in Eastern Asia. And I've never eaten a cockroach. The whole bit about them not peeing, but saving their pee in their bodies makes them seem not that appetizing.

• 49:05Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 49:06Speaker 01

  Some species I have been curious about, like Panklora, the banana cockroach, they're kind of green. They're one of the ones that are potentially pollinators and drinking nectar. They might taste nice.

• 49:16Alie Ward?

  And sure, plenty of people eat roaches, sometimes probably without telling anyone. And sometimes in broad daylight in cultures where it's perfectly normal, like China or Australia, Mexico, deep fried seems to be the way to go. And considering that in my country, in the sprawl of America, we eat deep fried Pepsi, which seems impossible from a physics perspective. But one BBC article titled, How Cockroaches Could Save Lives, praised our new buddy's exoskeletons for perhaps holding the key to antibiotic resistant infections, and also noted that cockroach tea was used in the Americas as a tetanus remedy. And cockroach cream and syrup is administered in some Chinese hospitals

• 50:00Alie Ward?

  for burns and stomach issues, even heart problems. So medicinal cockroaches also found in my home, to my own surprise. So your podmother, Jared, my spouse, has a black belt in jujitsu. And I brag about that a lot, but over the years, he has come home with just Checkerboard of injuries. Something's always hurting. So we have a lot of questionable remedies on hand. But the one that works wonders is this thing called the 701 Pain Easing Plaster. It's in this little yellow tin. It has both English and Chinese writing on the outside. And these are sticky plasters that come in a roll. It looks like brown fruit leather and it smells like menthol and camphor.

• 50:45Alie Ward?

  And if you look on the back, the first ingredient is ground beetles. And I was like, what does that mean? Dug in a little further and you will find it's an excellent euphemism for a wingless cockroach. These are pain patches made of cockroaches. And many, many times I have shared a bed with the minty ghosts of dead roaches. I don't care if you're eating right now. This is my truth. Savannah Johnson, first time question asker, and Mouse Paxton wanted to know. Mouse Paxton says, every time I eat bugles, I remember the time I once watched a Madagascar hissing cockroach give live birth for like 10 minutes at the Science Center while eating bugles. Are they good parents?

• 51:27Alie Ward?

  I really thought maybe that bugles would look like their genitalia, but no. This person was just eating bugles. Interestingly enough, I was eating bugles yesterday and I eat bugles about once every 10 years. So who knows? We're living in a simulation. I need you to know, I really don't eat bugles often. And while I ate bugles a few weeks back when this was recorded, I also ate bugles last night after your podmother and I had done some gardening. But while I'm generally doing a poorer job of parenting myself lately, let's see how the roaches are faring. So many patrons asked about roaches starting a family, including Casa Reed Dean, Oliver Callas, Key Lime Pie, Simone Francouer, Potato Puffer, Shayla Borger, and Kimberly Peck. Needed to know.

• 52:12Alie Ward?

  What kind of babies we talking? Some of them are popping out egg cases. Some of them are doing live births.

• 52:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:18Alie Ward?

  What's going on?

• 52:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a great question. Now, now I just can't. I, for a second, I thought maybe the cockroaches were eating the bugles.

• 52:25Alie Ward?

  I thought so too. I thought, I didn't, I didn't know where they were going with bugles, but now we know.

• 52:30Speaker 01

  Um, yeah, so parental care, another superpower of cockroaches. So like some of the sub-social ones, the females will stick around their offspring and keep it, protect them in burrows. In termites and the ones related to termites, they need to have these endosymbionts in their gut that help them eat wood. And so the parents stick around to feed that to them. Um, they also feed it to them through their butts by, you know, eating each other's butt secretions.

• 52:59Alie Ward?

  Oh.

• 53:00Speaker 01

  So another beautiful aspect of their physiology.

• 53:04Alie Ward?

  Do roaches have like one opening, such as a cloaca? Not really, kiddo. But they do have a multipurpose anus, like a pee and poo chute. And then the boys got dazzling asymmetric architectural dongs called phalamirs. And a genital appendage rhythmically inserted into a sweetheart to help with sperm transfer. And this organ is called a titillator. Now, your girly pop roaches, they have ovaries, vagina, an ovopositor, they got a genital pouch, and they have some surprises in store for you too.

• 53:37Speaker 01

  A defining feature of cockroaches is that egg case. But some, in some lineages, that egg case has been modified. So there's a group where they don't lay the egg case, they hold it inside of them and they let their young incubate inside the egg case, which they keep inside of their bodies. And then there's some that give true live birth, where they don't even have an egg case. The eggs just develop directly inside. The coolest example of parental care in one species is the young, uh, they have modified mouthparts. Their mouthparts are modified into like, not like a hypodermic needle, but they are modified to, to pierce their mother's exoskeleton and suck her blood.

• 54:21Alie Ward?

  Wow.

• 54:22Speaker 01

  So that's, that's a, that's a dedicated mom.

• 54:24Alie Ward?

  Oof, it's like nursing, but blood. Little vampire babies. Did you know that some cockroaches make milk for their babies? They're an odd series. Of events, I recently paid a lab to milk a cockroach for me. And I'll tell you all about it in a bonus episode coming out in a few days about cockroach milk. It's Pictober. What about their populations? Zenfrog, Cynthia Sinabar, Mark Hewlett, Meg Saluja, my geologist, Mini Mini, and Therasaporus Jess wanted to know, Zenfrog said, if I see one, how many are there really? Cynthia Sinabar, is it true that if you see one roach, there's a million hiding nearby? Is that true? I mean, from going in the forest, if

• 55:04Alie Ward?

  you see one in the forest, you know, that's not the only one, obviously.

• 55:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, in the forest, it's a general kind of thing in entomology or even broader ecology, where sometimes we only see like one individual of a species. There's probably way more of them. We just don't know where. Yeah. So when you see one, there's probably more because that individual had to come from somewhere and populations that are very small aren't well sustained. So it's a good hypothesis. Yeah.

• 55:36Alie Ward?

  So this really depends on the species. Some outdoor wood roaches can find their way in through a drain and they're only in your house because they got lost or they followed the call of a light source and were curious. Others say that if you have the little German roaches, there are about 100 more for every roach that you see. Also, take a Google and see what baby cockroaches look like. They're kind of beetle-esque with a little round butt. And I've gotten texts from friends asking what kind of bug they found. And I have to break the news to them that two roaches fell in love and now life is a nightmare. Unless you like roaches, which we do, we love them, right? We appreciate them.

• 56:19Alie Ward?

  Felipe Jimenez and Aura, first time question asker, want to know, Felipe asked, I would like to know if the ologist has the ringtone La Cucaracha.

• 56:30Speaker 01

  No, I don't.

• 56:32Alie Ward?

  You do not. Okay. Just checking. A few people asked what you thought of the song. Other people asked if you've seen Joe's Apartment. Have you seen Joe's Apartment? Not a dude named Joe, but a movie called Joe's Apartment about roaches. It's fine.

• 56:45Speaker 06

  This summer, we cordially invite you to spend the night at Joe's Apartment.

• 56:51Speaker 01

  La Cucaracha and Joe's Apartment? It doesn't really ever come up. I've seen parts of the relevant scene in Joe's Apartment.

• 56:57Alie Ward?

  The entire movie is about a guy who moves to New York and has an apartment infested with roaches who talk and are up to a lot of mayhem. And it is a horrifying way to approach the rom com genre. But let's just say after 30 years, 30 years ago, Joe's Apartment was released, people still talk about it. So I guess as a movie, it has legs. Now, another indelible art of the cockroach is Franz Kafka's 1915 literary masterpiece, Metamorphosis, which I'm not going to consider this a spoiler because it's literally the first paragraph and it's been out for 100 years. So consider this opening graph kind of like a sampler platter of some cockroach pop culture.

• 57:39Alie Ward?

  So it reads, "One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin. He lay on his armor-like back, and if he lifted his head a little, he could see his brown belly, slightly domed and divided by arches into stiff sections. The bedding was hardly able to cover it and seemed ready to slide off any moment. His many legs, pitifully thin compared with the size of the rest of him, waved about helplessly as he looked." So if you want a story about being a cockroach, Metamorphosis awaits. Are there any movies or books that do a good job of sort of celebrating the evolution and the majesty of the cockroach? Is Kafka one of them?

• 58:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, that's certainly a mysterious and ominous portrayal of possibly a cockroach in the Kafka story. I don't know, Wally made cockroaches kind of cute.

• 58:43Speaker 01

  But yeah, generally cockroaches are not portrayed in the way that I see them. I don't think about the American cockroach very much. And that's usually what is used in movies and TV and stuff is the American cockroach.

• 58:57Alie Ward?

  What cockroaches would you say you think about the most?

• 59:00Speaker 01

  So there's a group of cockroaches from South America called Neoblataline. They're very common in like the Amazon and they really haven't been studied at all in like 50 years. I think about them a lot because I want to study them. They're super diverse. Some of them are quite pretty. Some of them are like yellowy colored, but they have a lot of intricate patterns. And they're another one of the groups that have very interesting genitalia diversity in their genitalia. But it's impossible to work with them because so much of the work is, is like a hundred years old that we can't even really identify them. I just think about them a lot because I, I want to study them. I want to know what they're doing.

• 59:43Alie Ward?

  Briodiversity asked, can you talk about Symandoa concertferium, the so-called extinct cockroach known to inhabit a single bat cave in Guinea, West Africa, which was destroyed by mining? Eleanor Wall also asked about cave dwelling species, as did again Briodiversity. A cave cockroach, Helma blatta louisrothi, that hitches rides on bats in order to move caves? Have you heard of those ones?

• 1:00:12Speaker 01

  I have. So that, that example of the, the extinct cockroach that the Symandoa cockroach, that's always the example I throw out when people ask about like, oh, will cockroaches survive apocalypse? Well, we know of that one and it went extinct pretty quickly, we think.

• 1:00:28Alie Ward?

  And this Symandoa roach continues to thrive, but only in captivity, partly because it's a pretty chill pet, as long as you don't stress them out. And partly I think for design reasons, they are very cute. They have like a bumblebee little striped butt. They have nice white trim around their pronotum, we now know. Oh, and the one that rides a bat like getaway car is this stunning translucent butter yellow. So if you're in the market for a new special interest, or you need things to talk about at an upcoming holiday function, may I suggest cave cockroaches? Fantastic. Now, what if you hate this and everyone and this whole episode and me?

• 1:01:10Alie Ward?

  You're not alone. Many of you all caps'd me with questions like Ursula Goodwin's, who said, "I don't mind bugs, but I hate cockroaches. Why do I dislike them so much? Is this completely irrational?" Ziz, The Tangle System, W. Amanda Panda, Amy Hanks, Jacob Morve, Hope, Amanda Metcalf, Anastasia Press, Jennifer Jellytott, Mariana Alvarez, The Ren You Know, James Rorsati, Deborah L. Blanton, Sabrina Williams, Priukle, Kenny Shaver, Mark Rubin, Go Next Door, and even Roach Likers, Hegular, Chloe, and Nature Nessie, needed some insight on why these creatures give people the willies. What about Sienna Wanted To Know, as did a lot of people, "Please tell me how to love cockroaches. They are the only animals in the world

• 1:01:53Alie Ward?

  that I dislike, aside from a few notably awful human animals," they say. "What's a good way to get over your like, lily about them in order to appreciate them?"

• 1:02:06Speaker 01

  Like I said before, they're some of the best mothers in the animal kingdom. Just the amount of different parental care strategies that you'll see in them. If you live in a place where you can go outside and see like forest cockroaches, like if you live in South America or in an area with a wet tropical forest, go out and try to take pictures of them. Some of them are very pretty. If anyone goes to my iNaturalist page and look at my favorites, so that's I'm Roach Brain on iNaturalist, and look at my favorites, like, I don't see how you could look at some of these pictures of beautiful cockroaches and just not think, "Oh, okay, that's actually kind of nice." If not, wow, that's beautiful.

• 1:02:50Alie Ward?

  Roaches, again, are fashion. There are mint green roaches with delicate wings. There's a goofy-looking, ant-looking one, beautiful banded orange and brown and yellow, kind of like a throwback 1970s van or an alive candy corn. There's a lusa hermetica, which hails from South America. It glows under black light. It has two big spooky fake eyes on its face. You can get yourself a Halloween hisser from Madagascar, orange and black stripes. It makes noises when it hates you, when it's threatened or horny. A few species of Madagascar hissing critters huff and puff. They sound like a Windex bottle or a can of Duster on its last laugh.

• 1:03:35Alie Ward?

  Although the more you handle them, trying to get them to hiss, the less scared they are and the more over it they become. So you've gone from like a predator to a dance mom and they're not having it. Now, what are some other roaches you can cuddle with? Tortellini Hot wrote in and said, I have several Madagascar hissing cockroaches. One of them, Potatus, has a white wormy alien blob coming out of his butt. None of the entomologists I work with know what's going on, but he seems to be fine. Do you have any guesses? And I'm not an entomologist, nor am I a female cockroach. But based on some things I've seen online, he may just have a boner. Like you may be staring down the barrel of his titillator.

• 1:04:14Alie Ward?

  Now, Teacher, Thorposaurus, Jess, and Hope also asked about good ambassador species. Do you think that holding a Madagascar cockroach would be good exposure therapy? Ree asked why they're so calm compared to ones that run a little faster. But I feel like a Madagascar hissing roach is a good ambassador species for some.

• 1:04:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're fun. They're easy to handle. They're interesting to look at. They're not super ugly. Maybe to some people they are.

• 1:04:48Speaker 05

  Wow, okay.

• 1:04:49Speaker 01

  I do think they're a good ambassador. When entomologists, when we do outreach, we see that kids aren't usually afraid of looking at or handling Madagascar hissing cockroaches, but adults often are. It's not necessarily something inherently scary about them. It's just something that we learn over the course of our lives.

• 1:05:10Alie Ward?

  Kind of like snakes and spiders, same things. We see what's modeled. So not only do we have an episode on creepy crawlies called Forest Entomology, but we also just released an episode on what makes things creepy. And a big part of it is unpredictability. So if you know what a roach is doing, is that unpredictable? Are they creepy? I don't have answers. I'm just writing this like a Sex and the City newspaper column. Kate said, are they actually little sweetie babies? They seem to be lovely. Or have I just anthropomorphized the ones I've met? But all the Madagascar ones have been very, very chill and calm. But all of your research, it's taken you to many different places, I imagine, right?

• 1:05:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've done fieldwork mostly in South America, but also in West Africa. And it wasn't fieldwork, but I also did a postdoc in Paris, France. Some of the best researchers of cockroaches, both present and past, have been in the museum in Paris. You know, once there's a good collection of an insect group somewhere, then that attracts other people to research that insect group. And it kind of just builds over time.

• 1:06:18Alie Ward?

  I love the idea of an infestation of cockroach experts.

• 1:06:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:22Alie Ward?

  Fair.

• 1:06:24Alie Ward?

  Colony of cockroach experts. What's the hardest part about the job? Is it traveling to new places? Is that the best part? Is it paperwork? Is it misconception?

• 1:06:35Speaker 01

  Paperwork sucks, but the hardest part is that like I'm motivated a lot by conservation. And I want to use my research in order to understand how to better conserve cockroaches and other animals as well. Yet, in order to achieve that, I have to kill a lot of cockroaches. And if you're listening to this, you hate cockroaches more than me, but I've killed way more than you. And so, you know, it doesn't, it doesn't feel great.

• 1:07:01Alie Ward?

  I imagine it's, it's like ethanol usually and not just like putting down a bunch of borax.

• 1:07:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's ethanol. Grab them, stick them in a vial of ethanol and try to ignore the screams in your brain.

• 1:07:13Alie Ward?

  Do you think that they get so drunk right before they meet?

• 1:07:18Speaker 01

  I hope so.

• 1:07:19Alie Ward?

  Their great grandparents? Yeah, like maybe they're just hella loaded and then that's they slip into the next realm. What about the best thing about cockroaches? Your favorite thing or your favorite thing about being a latodologist? Latodologist?

• 1:07:35Speaker 01

  Well, other than the drinking their pee thing, which is the best fun fact. The thing that I think is, is best or most important about them is their ecological importance. Cockroaches are so abundant in tropical rainforests. Now, they're not as abundant as ants, wasps, but each individual cockroach tends to be larger. So they end up having a lot of biomass, which means that they're probably super important prey items for birds, small lizards, other insects.

• 1:08:09Alie Ward?

  I have heard of some people who live in gecko territories, that they bring a few geckos in to gobble up their roaches and spiders. But you've got to watch out for this because the roaches could be dusted in pesticides. You could be harming the geckos. Also, do not go by a gecko and let it roam free range. Or in 10 years, I'm going to have to make an episode about out of control invasive geckos because of you. Now, other people swear by rubbing a bar of Irish Spring Soap along doorways and windows to keep them out. I've heard Borax baits are effective. And there's a little syringe of roach bait you can squeeze out, kind of like peanut butter in different areas. And it's called Advion. And it has like 15,000 five star reviews.

• 1:08:52Alie Ward?

  In case you don't want these beautiful city creatures in your houses.

• 1:08:56Speaker 01

  So people don't like cockroaches in your houses, but cockroaches as a whole are hugely important to certain ecosystems. In fact, there's some studies showing that the largest proportion of animal biomass in tropical rainforest canopies are cockroaches.

• 1:09:16Alie Ward?

  Woo hoo, way to go.

• 1:09:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:19Alie Ward?

  Just dominating. I mean, it's so interesting that you can go into a forest and just not even have any comprehension of how surrounded by bugs you are. You can sit on a lawn and not realize like how many spiders are right under your butt.

• 1:09:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're just in every little crevice and doing everything you can possibly imagine.

• 1:09:39Alie Ward?

  So next time you see a roach, you can think about its relatives, pretend it's just a praying mantis, just a kind of a chubbier praying mantis, a rounder praying mantis, and maybe see if you can hold one.

• 1:09:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:09:55Alie Ward?

  Um, this has been so lovely. Thank you for letting me ask you so many cockroachy questions.

• 1:10:01Speaker 01

  You're welcome. Thank you, Ally.

• 1:10:04Alie Ward?

  So ask insect people ill-informed questions if you have to, because that's really the only way to bust some flim-flam. So how do you feel about roaches now? Do you feel better? I knew it. Send this to anyone who thinks roaches are out to get them personally. And to learn more about Dr. Evangelista's work, you can head to his lab website, roachbrain.com. Thank me later. Also, he does have that Gmail address, but only email him with roach praise or like good questions. You can talk to an exterminator for the rest. Okay, we are at Ologies on Instagram, a blue sky. I'm at Ali Ward with one L on both. You can find many more links up at aliward.com/ologies/blochotiology. A sordid catalog of Ologies episodes is available for you at ologies.com.

• 1:10:49Alie Ward?

  We have shorter, kid-friendly versions of Ologies called Smologies, and those are available wherever you get podcasts. To join our Patreon and submit questions or get early access to our live shows, go to patreon.com/ologies. Last week, I mentioned I'm doing our first ever live show on November 17th at the Bell House in Brooklyn. And folks, y'all almost sold it out. I think there are maybe 20 tickets left, as far as I know. And I didn't even put it on social media. So see there and join Patreon for $1 to get an early heads up on the next one. Aaron Talbert, Admins Eology's podcast Facebook group. Avilene Malik makes our professional transcripts. Kellyard Dwyer does the website. Noel Dilworth is our super speedy scheduling producer. Susan Hale gently rears us as our managing director. Jake Chafee sometimes works at night as our editor.

• 1:11:34Alie Ward?

  And lead editor of our audio colony is Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio. Nick Thorburn made the theme music. And if you stick around until the end of the show, I do burden you with a secret about my life. And whenever I give talks or someone asks me for career advice, I tell them how often I think of cockroaches in an aspirational way. Like, if you want a job, you sometimes can't watch a door and wait for it to open. You've got to cram in through the cracks like a cockroach. You want to be in there, you've got to scuttle under the door. You've got to send that email. You've got to send a follow-up email. Be willing to start small, too.

• 1:12:16Alie Ward?

  Like, eat a fingernail on the way up to that apple core. Outlast others. Be good to others. Keep your side of the antenna clean and get the hell in there. You are like a roach. You're smart enough. You're strong enough. That door jam can't stop you. Go forth. I'll see you on the other side. Okay, bye bye. Pachydermatology, homology, cryptozoology, litology, nanotechnology, meteorology, geology, geology, geology, geology, seriology, geology.

• 1:12:56Speaker 02

  I do like it.

• 1:13:00Speaker 02

  I like it very much.

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