This American Roach

A couple summers ago, Radiolab reporter Alex Neason got out of the shower and almost stepped on her worst nightmare: an American Cockroach. It was flipped onto its back, struggling, and for a split second, Alex swears she felt the spiny tickle of its legs on the underside of her bare foot. And, like every other time she has come into contact with a roach, this sent her into a debilitating spiral of fear, anger, and disgust. This week, Alex tries to understand what might be behind her fear, in the hopes she can overcome it. And in doing so, Alex learns more about these so-called pests than she could have ever wanted to. Special thanks to Jessica Ware, Timothy Marzullo, Alexandra Bell, and Changlu WangEPISODE CREDITS: Reported by - Alex NeasonProduced by - Jessica Yung and Annie McEwenwith mixing help from - Jeremy BloomFact-checking by - Sophie Samieeand Edited by - Pat Walters EPISODE CITATIONS: Articles - American Cockroaches, Racism, and the Ecology of the Slave Ship (https://zpr.io/UNKsMz7ZaLvb) by Lindsay Garcia, Arcadia Books - Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains (https://zpr.io/6E5wJBM4Kvcv) by Bethany Brookshire The Cockroach Papers (https://zpr.io/CvKePYxEMEAW) by Richard Schweid Cockroach (https://zpr.io/UuEAjmfqKccQ) by Marion Copeland Other cool stuff - Have fun with neuroscience and ... Roaches @ www.backyardbrains.com Sign up for our newsletter!! It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Signup (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)! Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today. Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [email protected]. Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

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  Wait, you're listening.

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  Okay.

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  All right.

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  Okay.

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  You're listening to Radiolab.

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  Radiolab.

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  From...

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  WNYC.

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  See?

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  Yep.

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  Okay, so doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo. I have to tell you a story.

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  All right.

• 0:24Speaker 01

  And I think I'm...

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  I'm Lot F'Nasser. This is Radiolab. And I'm sitting with reporter Alex Nisa.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  So my birthday is in August, and a couple summers ago, here in New York, we were in the middle of this very hot, very sticky heat wave.

• 0:42Speaker 00

  Okay.

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  And I had like a nice day. I didn't do too much. I think I went to my community garden. I remember spending some time there. There's a park near where I live that I like to go to.

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  And so I'd been outside all day. And I came home and needed to take a shower.

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  Okay.

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  And I was getting out of the shower in this like cloud of steam, drying off,

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  putting like moisturizer on my face. And I went

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  to leave the bathroom barefoot

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  to go into my bedroom, which is right next door, to get dressed.

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  Okay.

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  And I lifted my foot to take a step into the hallway. But right before it touched the floor, I felt these thready little legs on the bottom of my foot. And I looked down, and there, on its back, was a gigantic roach.

• 1:54Speaker 00

  Ah. Wait, what? I thought you were gonna say like a, like a serial killer. You mean like a, like a roach, like a cockroach?

• 2:01Speaker 01

  An American cockroach, yeah. And this was like a big one.

• 2:05Speaker 00

  Um, and it was on its back, like it was dying?

• 2:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, but with roaches, you just never know. Like, it could look dead, but be just alive enough that it's gonna flip back over and run at my leg.

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  Hmm.

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  And with my foot hovering over this bug, ugh, I'm flooded with revulsion, but also terror.

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  Like, this bug has gotta go now. And so I got back in the shower, scrubbed my foot, wrapped myself in a towel, ran to go find my cat, put her next to the roach, take a few steps back.

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  And I wait.

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  And she's looking at the roach and looking at me. And I'm like, do something. But she just walks away. So then I'm like, pull yourself together, like, buck up. I have to square up against the roach.

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  The dying or dead roach.

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  Right.

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  Okay.

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  So I put on yellow rubber gloves and then I get a wad of paper towels saturated in water. Grab toilet bowl cleaner, you know, like the blue gel.

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  Okay.

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  Squirt a bunch of it into the paper towel. And from like three feet away, toss it so that it lands gel down on top of the roach. And then I take a shoe and holding it like as far away from my body as I can get it.

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  I'm just like, like, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah.

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  Okay, yeah.

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  What?

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  Mm-hmm. Yeah.

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  And then I get a trash bag, scoop it up and stick it in there and then tie it up super tight.

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  Wow.

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  Then it goes into the trash chute.

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  And standing there in rubber gloves, next to the trash chute on my birthday, I'm just like, what is wrong with me? Like, this is not the first time that this has happened. Every single time I see a roach, I completely unravel. Like, I just go nuts. And I don't even hate bugs in general. It's just something about this bug. I don't know, like, I just snap. And for some reason, when it happened this time, I was like, I'm a whole adult person. I'm a science reporter. This has to stop.

• 4:30Speaker 00

  Huh. Okay. So is what is what we're doing here? Like, it's like how Alex learned to stop worrying and love the roach?

• 4:38Speaker 01

  Uh, not really. Um, I'm not really trying to get cozy with roaches. I just want to figure out how to get to a place where I'm not terrified of them. And obviously, I know this is something that a lot of people are afraid of. And I wanted to figure out, you know, is there something I can do so that the next time I see one, I don't completely lose my mind? So I figured I'd go hang out with people who face basically the worst version of this every single day.

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  Okay.

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  Which is how I ended up at the after-party.

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  This one of the finest expos in, in New York, probably in the nation.

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  For the New York City Pest Expo.

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  And we get, uh, top-notch pest control companies and exterminators from all over.

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  There was like a roach ball?

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  Yeah, it's like the social part. Like, there's food, there's drinks, there was a DJ, like, there's music. And also...

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  Oh, yeah, I've seen roaches drop off the ceiling.

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  A ton of people who have been in straight-up nightmare scenarios.

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  I've knocked on doors and seen them running up and down the doors.

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  Roaches were in everything from the record player to the TV to the bedhead. This place was literally, I'm, I'm telling you, Stephen King levels of roaches.

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  And yet, no fear.

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  We had to take care of the situation.

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  How many insects do you, do you have at home?

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  Oh, I have about four or 5,000 bedbugs. Yeah.

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  This is Lou Sorkin, an entomologist and pest control consultant.

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  All the three cockroach species, millipede, centipede, spiders, whip scorpion.

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  And right next to him, he had this huge plastic tub of cockroaches.

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  This is a Madagascar hissing cockroach.

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  Oh, yes. Madagascar ones are huge, right?

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  Yeah, like some of the biggest roaches in the world. And at one point, Lou just picked one up with his bare hands.

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  They won't bother you. They're just, you know, sitting. They're tasting. You could see the palps come from the mouth, down and touch my skin.

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  I think I might have my first tonight. We'll see. And I was like, how are these people like that?

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  Hi.

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  Nice to meet you. And could I get like that?

• 6:54Speaker 06

  Well, let's go. Take a stroll.

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  So I found some exterminators who agreed to let me follow them around. One named Lakeisha Fulcher.

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  Here we have 11 buildings, all 16 stories.

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  She works at a public housing complex on the Lower East Side.

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  If I go in your house, you have 300 roaches. I'm happy. Give me five days. Let's go.

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  And also, a guy named Cedric Simmons. He has his own company.

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  So right now, we're headed to North Bronx to a residential unit that has been having some issues with German roaches.

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  And they just started showing me the ropes.

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  Flashlight is the most essential piece of the toolkit.

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  We went into basements and trash rooms.

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  I'm turning the light on, of course. They're scattering. They're going to places like this.

• 7:42Speaker 01

  They showed me how to find signs that roaches were living there, even when they're hiding.

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  So you'll be looking for marks like this, what look like pen tapping. It'll look like pepper, like stuck pepper on a wall. It's roach droppings.

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  And, of course, how to kill them.

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  There's one right by the door. Oh, yeah. See it?

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  Cedric takes me inside this house, and the first thing he does is take a look around the closet with his flashlight. And you can see the roaches perched up on the wall.

• 8:10Speaker 06

  Oh, there's two more up there.

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  And then he goes to the kitchen sink, and he pulls out this jug, and it's this chemical, you know, it's basically industrial strength raid.

• 8:19Speaker 06

  Yeah, it is pretty strong. It has a pretty good knockdown, too. Knockdown meaning how quick it reduces the population.

• 8:27Speaker 01

  The kind of stuff you need a license to buy. Like, you can't get this at Home Depot.

• 8:30Speaker 06

  So what does this actually?

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  Due to them.

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  So it attacks their nervous system and it disrupts it and it makes them basically just incapable. And then it succumbs them.

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  Is it painful for them?

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  I don't know. I don't know.

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  At some point, he pointed out a pregnant roach.

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  That one back there has its egg sac about to come out.

• 8:51Speaker 05

  The one on the wall?

• 8:52Speaker 06

  Yeah, in the corner.

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  Is that that little like?

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  That's protruding up.

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  Very end?

• 8:57Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's an egg sac.

• 8:58Speaker 05

  Oh, man.

• 8:59Speaker 01

  And then he started spraying them. And after about 10 minutes, they made their last twitches.

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  That guy's definitely dead.

• 9:08Speaker 00

  How did you feel about that? Like, did you feel bad?

• 9:11Speaker 01

  Um, sort of.

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  It, the sac is coming out.

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  Damn.

• 9:17Speaker 01

  I was like, that sucks for a second.

• 9:21Speaker 06

  Yeah.

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  And then it's like, I didn't think about it for the rest of the day.

• 9:24Speaker 06

  Oh, wow.

• 9:25Speaker 05

  Sorry.

• 9:26Speaker 01

  Honestly, what I really felt were these little glimmers of confidence.

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  Like you weren't afraid?

• 9:32Speaker 01

  Well, it's not that I wasn't afraid, but it was like my fear had shrunk just enough that I was starting to feel kind of bold. Like maybe I could kill these things too.

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  So here we have roach activity and rodent activity. Yep.

• 9:46Speaker 05

  And then also that's the.

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  Grind and abate, yeah.

• 9:49Speaker 01

  Okay, we saw one. I didn't freak out. Like Cedric took me to Grand Central Station.

• 9:56Speaker 01

  And let's, let's, let's go for it. I was seeing fat roaches and acting like it was no big deal. Ooh, big one. Okay. I didn't like it. It's so tall. But it was nothing like before.

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  So I can step on them or I can spray them?

• 10:12Speaker 01

  Um, I don't know. Stepping seems kind of old school. Maybe we do that? Oh!

• 10:22Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 10:24Speaker 06

  That was funny.

• 10:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:29Speaker 01

  But then, one night, I was just sitting around my apartment.

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  A friend was over, we were watching TV.

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  Okay.

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  And I went to the kitchen for a glass of water.

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  And I saw something slightly moved in the sink. So I looked inside and I saw antennae.

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  And I was like, nope. Walked straight out of the kitchen, got my friend, told him he needs to come deal with it. And then I stood behind him and squealed while I watched him kill it.

• 11:07Speaker 00

  Wait, what happened to all your training?

• 11:09Speaker 01

  I don't know. I just couldn't do it.

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  What?

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  I mean, first of all, Lakeisha and Cedric, nowhere to be found.

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  Right.

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  And second of all, I was seeing this roach in my house, in my sink, where I had just washed blueberries that morning. And I think it triggered some kind of survival instinct. And I just don't think any amount of pest control knowledge was going to override that.

• 11:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:33Speaker 01

  Basically, I was just like, okay, well, that didn't work. Back to square one, you know, I gotta start over. And one day I was just Googling around and I stumbled across this guy.

• 11:46Speaker 05

  Hey, guys. I'm Chef Joseph Yoon, edible insect ambassador at Brooklyn Bugs. And we're gonna show you how to eat all these bugs.

• 11:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've seen this YouTube video of him doing like different dishes with bugs.

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  Yeah, like gourmet dishes.

• 12:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:04Speaker 05

  Bug appetit. The beautiful notes of cricket, umami, and nuttiness. This is perfect.

• 12:12Speaker 00

  Oh, wait, but you're not gonna...

• 12:13Speaker 01

  Well, I just thought if anyone could help me get over that revulsion I feel towards these bugs.

• 12:20Speaker 05

  This scorpion literally adds so much flavor.

• 12:24Speaker 01

  Maybe it's this guy. Like, if I could just eat a roach, maybe it wouldn't be nasty anymore. It would just be a little snack.

• 12:31Speaker 00

  Okay, all right.

• 12:33Speaker 01

  And so I sent him an email and I was like, do you ever cook with roaches? And he wrote back to me and was like, absolutely not. I'm already having to do a lot of work to convince people that they should eat other bugs. Roaches have such a bad reputation. Like, roaches don't help my cause, basically.

• 12:50Speaker 00

  I love that it's a bridge too far for him.

• 12:52Speaker 01

  So I went back and forth with him, being like, you're the only person I can possibly think of who could make me like eating a roach.

• 13:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 13:01Speaker 01

  And then finally.

• 13:02Speaker 00

  You bullied him into doing it.

• 13:04Speaker 01

  He, like, I fear I might have. I fear I might have.

• 13:08Speaker 05

  Sounds good.

• 13:12Speaker 05

  Well, let's see. Let's see.

• 13:14Speaker 00

  Okay, so what happened? Let's do it. What's going on?

• 13:16Speaker 01

  Right. So me and eight of our colleagues. Joseph had, like, very, very generously invited us to his home in Queens.

• 13:26Speaker 05

  We're all gonna try something really kind of unusual and weird.

• 13:31Speaker 01

  So obviously, all of us are really nervous, including Joseph, because he's never actually eaten an American cockroach before. So we started with his usual dishes: crickets, ants, mealworms.

• 13:45Speaker 05

  This is the, uh, brewed 19 cicadas, and it has a cricket, uh, tempura batter on it.

• 13:53Speaker 00

  Okay, so this is just the warm-up?

• 13:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:55Speaker 00

  It's delicious. I love it.

• 13:57Speaker 01

  It's good. And the whole time, I'm looking over at the bowl of cockroaches on the counter out of the side of my eye. And, by the way, they weren't, like, random roaches. These were food-safe from a lab.

• 14:08Speaker 00

  Okay, good to know.

• 14:09Speaker 01

  And honestly, let's have, I was kind of in denial that any of this was about to happen.

• 14:14Speaker 05

  They're quite frightening, I would think. Maybe I'll pull the legs off of them.

• 14:21Speaker 01

  Please, first up, do be a roach is.

• 14:23Speaker 05

  Uh, there might be innards that squirt in your mouth.

• 14:26Speaker 01

  Fried. I can't really taste anything, which is ideal. Oh, something.

• 14:31Speaker 05

  It's mental.

• 14:32Speaker 00

  Something poked the inside of my mouth. It's a leg? You think it's a leg?

• 14:36Speaker 01

  I loved it. I don't know what it was, but I hated it. Inside of the bag. You're doing really good. Next, Madagascar hissing cockroaches. And he had blanched these and done nothing else.

• 14:49Speaker 05

  You can dress a cockroach, but it's still a cockroach.

• 14:51Speaker 01

  He put them on a cutting board and sliced them so we could slurp the insides out like an oyster. It looks like cottage cheese. But this one was not that bad.

• 15:00Speaker 05

  It has like a really umami smell.

• 15:05Speaker 01

  Much better. It was like eggs.

• 15:09Speaker 01

  And then finally, my arch nemesis,

• 15:14Speaker 01

  the American cockroach.

• 15:19Speaker 01

  So he grabs some kind of cooking oil, throws it in a pan, and adds all these aromatics like garlic, red pepper, and then he throws in the roaches.

• 15:29Speaker 05

  You know what? It has kind of a chemi smell to it that the other two didn't have. It's kind of weird.

• 15:33Speaker 01

  But as he started to cook, everyone's faces, including Joseph's, just started to fall because no matter how long he was like sauteing these freaking roaches with all these aromatics, it just smelled off.

• 15:50Speaker 05

  Abhor, abhor, abhor. Let's just have the chocolate crockets.

• 15:52Speaker 01

  But Joseph still grabbed a spoon.

• 15:54Speaker 05

  I think someone has to do it.

• 15:56Speaker 01

  Took a bite.

• 15:57Speaker 05

  What does it taste like?

• 16:00Speaker 01

  And the look on his face made me feel really guilty.

• 16:05Speaker 05

  I mean, I almost spit out what I ate.

• 16:07Speaker 01

  Trestreals producer Alan Gafinski also tried it.

• 16:11Speaker 00

  Nervous.

• 16:16Speaker 00

  I mean, doesn't, um... Oh, yeah, there it is.

• 16:24Speaker 00

  Well, initially, it just kind of, I just was tasting sort of the garlic, like an onion. But that smell that you guys have been smelling is... It's also a taste.

• 16:37Speaker 05

  It tastes like something that you shouldn't... What is the rochi smell smelling?

• 16:42Speaker 01

  Kind of like medicinal, but in like a foul sour kind of way.

• 16:50Speaker 00

  So you did not eat it?

• 16:51Speaker 01

  No, like, according to a Bugs as Food expert, the American cockroach is literally inedible.

• 16:58Speaker 05

  It's a warning sign to me. It's like, kind of like, don't eat me. I dare you to eat me. I'll kill you.

• 17:04Speaker 00

  Man, this is really not going well.

• 17:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, the whole thing completely backfired.

• 17:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:12Speaker 01

  So we're gonna take a quick break.

• 17:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, cleanse our palates.

• 17:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, but after the break, things are gonna get even messier. We'll be right back.

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• 19:04Speaker 00

  I'm Latif Nasr. This is Radiolab, back with reporter Alex Neeson, who has just faced her deep-seated fear of the roach in a number of unspeakable ways.

• 19:13Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 19:14Speaker 00

  But it backfired, and she only managed to surface her maybe even more deep-seated disgust for them.

• 19:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I didn't want them in my life, in my city, in my state.

• 19:24Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 19:24Speaker 01

  Anywhere.

• 19:25Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 19:25Speaker 01

  On planet Earth.

• 19:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:26Speaker 01

  I just hate them.

• 19:28Speaker 07

  This position is okay.

• 19:30Speaker 01

  And...

• 19:30Speaker 07

  This boom likes to slide.

• 19:32Speaker 01

  Sort of amidst all of this,

• 19:35Speaker 01

  I came across this book called "Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains",

• 19:38Speaker 00

  Ooh.

• 19:39Speaker 01

  by science writer...

• 19:40Speaker 07

  Can I cuss on this program?

• 19:41Speaker 01

  Yes. Bethany Brookshire.

• 19:43Speaker 07

  So, this squirrel is known as Fucking Kevin.

• 19:46Speaker 01

  And this book, it was just on the front table at my neighborhood bookstore, but it turned out to be exactly what I needed. Because while the animal Bethany hates is a squirrel...

• 19:56Speaker 07

  And he lives in the maple tree in front of my house.

• 19:58Speaker 01

  Particularly the ones that she named Kevin.

• 20:00Speaker 07

  Fucking Kevin.

• 20:01Speaker 01

  Who were eating all of her tomatoes.

• 20:03Speaker 07

  Doesn't even eat it. Just one bite, and then leaves it.

• 20:05Speaker 01

  So this is like, personal?

• 20:06Speaker 07

  Yes. I really did contemplate a BB gun.

• 20:08Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 20:09Speaker 07

  But Kevin is one of the creatures that led me to this deep question of...

• 20:13Speaker 01

  The question the book was asking...

• 20:15Speaker 07

  What is it that makes us hate animals?

• 20:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:21Speaker 01

  I could sort of feel it elevating me out of my murder, murder, murder, kill, kill, kill lizard brain to this idea that I could really get behind.

• 20:29Speaker 07

  Every time an animal has succeeded really well at living near us, we hate them.

• 20:34Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 20:34Speaker 07

  If we can't take it in, tame it, and put it in a little, little doggy sweater, we do not want it.

• 20:40Speaker 01

  That word "pest" takes an animal that is like a living, breathing creature that lives here on this planet with us and turns it into an object.

• 20:48Speaker 07

  We're saying that that animal has no value. We are saying that anything we need to do to get rid of that animal is worthwhile.

• 21:00Speaker 01

  Which is exactly how I feel about roaches. And she sort of proposes that we should do away with the category of pest altogether.

• 21:09Speaker 07

  Mm hmm.

• 21:10Speaker 01

  Wait, that's fascinating. Um, and, you know, the wheels in my head just like start spinning. And I just kept thinking like, huh, this is how I want to be in the world. What I want my politic to be. Like, I'm gonna make a T-shirt that says abolish pests and let people ask me about it. Like, I'm down. And I really want to not hate the roach. Yes, but how?

• 21:31Speaker 07

  Well, so a lot of the way we respond to animals and the anger we feel and the frustration arises out of our own ignorance.

• 21:44Speaker 00

  Sounds like you need to, you know, walk a mile in their little weird disgusting feet.

• 21:51Speaker 01

  Ugh, I know. I think it's time to learn about these revolting, repulsive, nauseating, offensive, terrible animals.

• 22:04Speaker 06

  Okay, so let's chat a little bit about the disgust response.

• 22:09Speaker 01

  So I called up entomologist Sammy Ramsey, professor at the University of Colorado Boulder.

• 22:14Speaker 06

  Okay, I needed you to see what is happening on this tree. Look at this.

• 22:18Speaker 01

  Because this guy-

• 22:19Speaker 06

  Somebody look at this.

• 22:20Speaker 01

  Really-

• 22:21Speaker 06

  How cute is this bug?

• 22:22Speaker 01

  Loves bugs.

• 22:24Speaker 06

  This bug, how cute is this bug?

• 22:28Speaker 01

  He even has a YouTube channel where he sometimes sings to bugs.

• 22:33Speaker 00

  Okay, he likes bugs.

• 22:34Speaker 01

  I love it. And so I thought, if anyone can help me abolish the pest in my heart, it would be Sammy.

• 22:39Speaker 06

  All right, Alex, listeners, y'all ready for Dr. Sammy's story time?

• 22:43Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 22:44Speaker 06

  It's Dr. Sammy's story time. All right, y'all. We're gonna get some theme music for that at some point, but anyway.

• 22:49Speaker 01

  And maybe it's just because Sammy is really charming, but talking to him, I couldn't help but feel my hatred of the roach-

• 22:56Speaker 06

  They are the coolest?

• 22:57Speaker 01

  -begin to soften.

• 22:58Speaker 06

  Cockroaches are- Survivors.

• 23:01Speaker 01

  I learned that they're at least as old as the dinosaurs as a species.

• 23:05Speaker 06

  They can go for ridiculous amounts of time without food. You can cut off a cockroach's head and it can survive for more than a week.

• 23:11Speaker 01

  They can run like three miles an hour. They're basically the cheetah of the insect world.

• 23:15Speaker 06

  Cool. They are very resistant to nuclear radiation. They can eat paper, just paper.

• 23:21Speaker 01

  It's some of these survival techniques, like their tendency to run away from light and their ability to flatten their bodies and squeeze into.

• 23:27Speaker 06

  Even the tiniest crack or crevice.

• 23:29Speaker 01

  That make people distrust them.

• 23:30Speaker 06

  Like we step on a cockroach.

• 23:35Speaker 01

  And then ever so slowly lift our foot.

• 23:43Speaker 06

  And it runs away. And we're just like, what?

• 23:45Speaker 01

  How?

• 23:46Speaker 06

  What sort of sorcery did you just do?

• 23:49Speaker 01

  So I was listening to all this stuff Sammy was telling me.

• 23:52Speaker 06

  Do they have nine lives?

• 23:53Speaker 01

  It was almost like I could feel the roach begin to transform into something more than just a pest.

• 24:03Speaker 01

  So they've sort of evolved to protect themselves in this way from us, the predator. And like other predators, I guess.

• 24:13Speaker 06

  Like these organisms are absolutely incredible. And had they not.

• 24:17Speaker 01

  But then he told me that as much as I didn't want cockroaches around.

• 24:21Speaker 06

  Cockroaches, they don't want to be here.

• 24:23Speaker 01

  They didn't want to be around either.

• 24:25Speaker 00

  Huh, what does that mean?

• 24:27Speaker 01

  Well, apparently the name.

• 24:29Speaker 06

  Periplinita americana, the American cockroach.

• 24:32Speaker 01

  Is a misnomer.

• 24:33Speaker 06

  They used to live their best lives just running around on a totally different continent.

• 24:38Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 24:38Speaker 06

  But in order to really tell its story, I need to take you back hundreds of years. When colonists showed up on the west coast of Africa, they corralled a bunch of human beings onto these ships. They stacked them like furniture and gave them no opportunities to behave like humans, to go to the restroom. The cleanliness standards on those ships were pretty low. And there were also some hitchhikers. On those ships. See, the American cockroach is actually from Africa.

• 25:12Speaker 06

  And they climbed aboard those ships that had a bunch of unprotected food in various places. And they found the slats of wood between the ships to be great spaces for them to wedge their bodies. And when they got to the US, they set up a whole new population.

• 25:26Speaker 01

  So they got here on slave ships?

• 25:28Speaker 06

  They didn't really have too much of a, a, a choice in the matter.

• 25:31Speaker 01

  He tells me this in this conversation and I, it just like, it felt like,

• 25:37Speaker 01

  damn.

• 25:39Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 25:41Speaker 01

  Why, like, why would you, let's start this whole conversation over and just like, can we just not? It was just sort of like, ah, like, I can't even just hate a bug without the shadow of slavery.

• 25:54Speaker 01

  Like, I just wanted to hate this bug and see if I could not hate it. And then it's like, now this.

• 26:00Speaker 00

  Hmm. I mean, can you, like, what was inside of that moment for you?

• 26:07Speaker 01

  Well, I talked to a bunch of people about this.

• 26:10Speaker 07

  Are you asking me if I feel kinship to these roaches?

• 26:12Speaker 01

  Nope, absolutely not. And one of them was author and my friend, Angela Flournoy.

• 26:19Speaker 07

  Obviously, the metaphor is abound.

• 26:22Speaker 01

  Because there's like the thing that I think everyone's gonna do, which is be like, oh, great. Shared history. You guys survived something together. And so, you know, you should feel some special connection to this insect.

• 26:34Speaker 00

  Right.

• 26:34Speaker 01

  That just sort of walks itself into, into the room.

• 26:36Speaker 00

  It does.

• 26:36Speaker 01

  And I'm like, absolutely not. That story just plays straight, like directly into, like, all the old, just the oldest and most boring racist story that's been told about black people in this country. I mean, roach is an old anti-black slur. And because of racism, black people were forced into poor housing conditions. And so sometimes had to live in closer proximity to the roach. And of course, I knew all that, but to see that that line of history actually started with a roach on a slave ship is just like,

• 27:08Speaker 06

  Wow, that is, um, Yeah, it just feels like, it's just like, damn, like, Yeah.

• 27:13Speaker 01

  I told Cedric Simmons, the exterminator.

• 27:16Speaker 06

  You know, a lot of people won't treat it with, with caring hands.

• 27:18Speaker 01

  And he spoke to this fear of mine.

• 27:21Speaker 06

  I think they'll weaponize it, you know?

• 27:22Speaker 01

  Like, should I suppress this? Like, everything winds up in the wrong hands. And it's like,

• 27:28Speaker 07

  Oh, those people, they're, they probably already know, you know? I just like assume.

• 27:33Speaker 03

  ChatGPT is probably telling people this information, you know? We live in a dystopia.

• 27:37Speaker 01

  But still, does putting this in my story, like, could it deepen this racist idea? Like, does it give legitimacy to the idea that some people have that black people and roaches go together?

• 27:52Speaker 03

  I think that it's really, it's legitimate, the feelings of, I've tried since I knew I was gonna come and talk to you about cockroaches, which I, who I also, you know, I really don't like them. And I, I, um, I've been thinking about some of the origins of my dislike. And when I was growing up, my mom was really like, we would go over to a certain relative's house or whatever, and she would like make us shake everything out on our porch before we came inside the house. And she was very over the top, like vigilant about roaches and assumptions about like cleanliness. And some of that had to do with this idea of like shame and like socioeconomic shame.

• 28:34Speaker 03

  And if this says something about us, like we might not have all the money, et cetera, but we're fastidious. And one evidence of that is like, we don't have roaches.

• 28:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. The honest thing is that like when I tell a stranger a story on the record about a roach in my home, like there is something, however small, in my chest that's a little bit like, damn, now they know.

• 28:58Speaker 03

  Well, you have to free yourself from, you have to free that yourself in that shame. From, you know?

• 29:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:05Speaker 03

  You have to free yourself of the burden of, like, that roach ain't got nothing to do with you.

• 29:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:15Speaker 07

  I think of roaches in the same way that I think of rats.

• 29:19Speaker 01

  Again, Bethany Brookshire.

• 29:21Speaker 07

  These are animals that are succeeding because our social contract has failed.

• 29:26Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 29:27Speaker 07

  Right? The roach arrived in America and succeeded because of a massive failure

• 29:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:33Speaker 07

  of a social contract that we called enslavement. Right? And they continue to succeed where social contracts fail, where racism thrives, you know, where people end up underserved and kind of forced into histories that leave them in a state of poverty and lack of opportunity. Right? And so you could see them.

• 30:00Speaker 01

  Not so much as a parallel story, so much as a symbol of the failed social contract that kind of got us here.

• 30:13Speaker 01

  My goal here is to regard the roach as a roach. And in so many ways, the roach is not just a roach. The roach is a stand-in for like, class and race and like, all of these things that are like way more consequential than just like a bug being a bug, you know?

• 30:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:28Speaker 01

  And all of this got me thinking about another roach fact.

• 30:31Speaker 05

  I can talk about bugs forever, so.

• 30:33Speaker 01

  That Sammy told me about, which is that roaches are only dirty because they live in our sewer systems, which are filthy. And just like in New York, the way we dispose of trash, what do we do with it? We stick it out on the street all night. And then the roaches crawl all over it and pick up germs and stuff.

• 30:48Speaker 05

  And these roaches, as gross as they can be sometimes, are constant cleaners.

• 30:53Speaker 01

  They're actually naturally very clean animals, cleaning their antenna almost the way that cats clean their whiskers.

• 30:59Speaker 05

  Making sure that they're getting rid of all the bits of foreign matter that could accumulate bacteria or fungi.

• 31:06Speaker 01

  They spend a lot of time trying to clean themselves of filth that they picked up from us. And it made me wonder, if you take away all the different layers of human filth that we've placed on the roach,

• 31:20Speaker 01

  what's left? What is that animal?

• 31:24Speaker 00

  Huh. Yeah, and where? I'm curious, I want to hear more about like, how they live on the continent that they are native to.

• 31:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, so like, they live basically anywhere that there's vegetation. So jungle, forests, and they eat primarily organic matter. Leaves, decomposing trees, logs. They're decomposers, so they also eat like, the bodies of dead animals and plants.

• 31:51Speaker 00

  It's so funny to think of them like, not in a house or a city or something? Like, that they're actually like, forest creatures, you know?

• 31:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And actually, I thought I would end this story by taking you there, to the place they came from.

• 32:16Speaker 01

  We're deep in a tropical rainforest in the Congo Basin.

• 32:22Speaker 01

  Huge trees, capuchins and mahogany's, tower hundreds of feet overhead. They're cannibals, filled with monkeys and parrots and eagles. The air is thick and humid. And on the ground, scurrying along the edge of a rotten log, is a female, American cockroach.

• 32:53Speaker 01

  And this one is about to become a mother.

• 33:01Speaker 01

  At the base of her abdomen is a reddish capsule called an euthyca. It's shaped like a tiny kidney bean. Inside it are 16 eggs.

• 33:14Speaker 01

  She carries them and incubates them within this protective casing, dragging it along like a wagon.

• 33:23Speaker 01

  She pauses briefly to nibble at the edge of a damp leaf.

• 33:31Speaker 01

  She carries on, gliding effortlessly across the jagged debris that covers the forest floor,

• 33:38Speaker 01

  until she comes across a small hole in the soft, muddy soil.

• 33:44Speaker 01

  She pauses, looking both ways, making sure the coast is clear, before dropping the euthyca inside.

• 33:54Speaker 01

  She stares down at her children, or maybe past them.

• 34:00Speaker 01

  One by one, she oscillates her antennae up towards the sky and back down again, slow and considered, as if reciting a prayer.

• 34:14Speaker 01

  And then, she scurries away.

• 34:22Speaker 01

  A month passes. The eggs inside become tiny translucent larvae, each the size of a grain of rice.

• 34:33Speaker 01

  They've grown long, thin, and tenny, which are folded forward into a tangle of their six stringy legs.

• 34:42Speaker 01

  The larvae have no lungs, so they breathe through ten little holes along the sides of their bellies.

• 34:50Speaker 01

  They're getting hungry and thirsty.

• 34:55Speaker 01

  And one day, as if responding in perfect time to an invisible conductor, all sixteen babies flex the muscles in their abdomens and in unison take a giant, collective breath.

• 35:11Speaker 01

  Their slender bodies swell with air, growing and growing and growing, until the utica pops, cutting the last tie to their mother that they've got.

• 35:29Speaker 01

  And together, they scatter.

• 35:34Speaker 01

  Some towards the river,

• 35:38Speaker 01

  some towards a wall of underbrush,

• 35:42Speaker 01

  some up the thick trunks of hundred-year-old trees,

• 35:48Speaker 01

  out into the forest

• 35:51Speaker 01

  to begin their lives.

• 36:30Speaker 00

  This episode was reported by Alex Neeson and produced by Jessica Yung and Annie McEwen. It was edited by Pat Walters and fact-checked by Sophie Samiye. Special thanks to Jessica Ware, Timothy Marzullo, and Alexandra Bell. That's it for us. Thanks for listening.

• 36:57Speaker 02

  Hi, I'm Gabby. I'm from the Bay Area, California. And here are the staff credits. Radiolab is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser. Sauron Wheeler is our executive editor. Sarah Sandback is our executive director. Our managing editors, Pat Walters. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Jeremy Blum, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Nainasambandan, Matt Keelty, Mona Murgauker, Alex Neeson, Sarah Kari, Natalia Ramirez, Rebecca Rand, Anissa Vitza, Arianne Whack, Molly Webster, and Jessica Yung, with help from Gabby Santas. Our fact-checkers are

• 37:40Speaker 02

  Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Natalie Middleton, Angeli Mercado, and Sophie Samiye.

• 37:50Speaker 02

  Hi, I'm Aubrey, calling from Salt Lake City, Utah. Leadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Simon Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.