Slimy. Disgusting.
Ugly. Creepy. Cockroaches!
No one wants’em. Yet they’ve persisted for more than 350 million years despite man’s attempts to get rid of them. Without control, one pair of German roaches can expand to more than 2 million in less than a year.
Roaches are found in every part of the U.S. They like nearly any area humans like especially where food, moisture and warmth are abundant. Cockroaches prefer darkness and crawl into amazingly small crevices as small as the thickness of a dime! An adult cockroach can live for a month without food as long as water or moisture is present.
Roaches carry and spread diseases. It’s not unusual for bacteriologists to find salmonella bacteria (which causes food poisoning in humans) on the bodies of cockroaches. Additionally, cockroaches are believed to spread viruses and their presence can cause allergic reactions for many people, especially asthmatic children.
What can you do if you find cockroaches in your living environment? The most important method of cockroach prevention and control is sanitation. Even a few crumbs that slip down beside a stove, for example, can serve as a gourmet dinner for several cockroaches for some time.
Cockroach Trivia
- The fastest recorded speed
measured for the American cockroach is nearly 2.0 miles per hour, or
nearly 75 centimeters per second! In the absolute sense, this is a much
slower speed than many vertebrates are able to attain. In relation to
body size, however, it is remarkably fast. If speed were increased proportionally,
an American cockroach the size of a lion could run about 50 miles per
hour.
- Cockroach excrement and body
parts are major allergens in house dust.
- The German cockroach is not
really German. In fact, the Germans call it the Prussian cockroach.
It is thought to have originated in Southern Asia.
- Most cockroaches are unlike
the majority of insects in that their exoskeleton is coated not with
a waxy layer but with a greasy one. Among other things, this characteristic
enables cockroaches to slide into narrow cracks and crevices where even
the human foot cannot reach them.
- The Madagascar hissing cockroach has become a popular pet in some parts of the U.S.
- Cockroaches are known assassins
of their roommate, the bedbug.
- In some parts of the world,
roaches are profitably raised for chicken feed.
- Among all the attributes
of the city of Dallas, Texas, is the Cockroach Hall of Fame.
- The world’s largest
roach (which lives in South America) is four inches long with a seven-inch
wingspan.
- A cockroach that has just
shed its skeleton is white with black eyes. After eight hours, it has
regained its regular coloring.
- Cockroaches spend 75% of
their time just resting.
- There are 4,000 species of cockroaches worldwide.