August 15, 2013 • 43 mins
You've seen them in your home and probably squealed in terror, but now it's time to learn all about cockroaches. From their ability to run incredibly fast to the appendage that alerts them when you're about to whack them with your shoe, cockroaches are fascinating creatures that deserve your respect.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Come to stuff you should know from house Stuff work
stocks dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. And
I'm Josh Clark and Charles W. Chuck Bryant is with me.
He's got his glasses on, he's got his hair shorn,
his fingernails are chewed down to the quick. He's ready
to go. I was hoping we could open the show
(00:23):
with lakukaracha playing in the background. Well, oh yeah, we can't.
I don't know if we can or not. I can't know.
There's no way we can't. Well, hold on, let's let's
humme it. We could probably do that, right, that's wayne.
People just imagine in your heads that you're sipping a
margharita and some mariachi band is playing lukukaracha right now.
Not to be confused with tequila, no, which is similar.
(00:46):
Now I always confused it too, really well, not want
to hear him, but like if I think of la
kukaracha like I often think of Peewee dancing on the bar,
then I'm like, oh, yeah, this tequila. But you know
what Luca lookukarat is about out. I assumed cockroaches, but
probably not. No, a cockroach who has lost one of
his legs and it's having a hard time. I just
(01:08):
found that out today. I did not know that. Look
at me. I didn't either until like just a few
hours ago, Chuck, I was once like, you naive to
the way of Kaa. Alright, so we talked about lakukaratas
you'd hoped you feel good. Yeah, have you ever seen
the X Files episode with the cockroaches. I don't know. Oh,
(01:31):
it is perfect. It's one of the top five. And
it's not even like a part of it, part of
the big bigger picture once, it's like its own thing. Yeah,
they have the name for those episodes. I can't remember
what it's called. But like when it's just about a
shape shift or and it has nothing to do with
the overarching conspiracy. Yeah, it's one of those, and it's
(01:51):
just about cockroaches and a cockroach infestation may or may
not exist. But at one point, like it's getting really
like the cockroaches are everywhere and like everybody's starting to
go a little crazy and all that, and they they
m digitized the cockroach like crawling across your TV screen
like obviously not part of the scene, and it looks
(02:11):
like it was on your screen. So like, you're it
looks like there's a cockroach in your house. It was,
it was, It's a good episode. Yeah, I was late
on the X Files. I didn't watch it when it
was out. And then when I moved to New Jersey
they started doing reruns and Justin I was living at
the time, was like, you never watched X Files. It
was like no, And then it was on every night.
(02:33):
I watched the crap out of it that did you
see the Charles Nelson Riley one where he's like an artist?
It's jose Chunks from outer Space? Remember where like could
Jessie the Body Venture and Alex Trebecker in it? Really,
I didn't know. I must not have seen them all
because I was catching them on reruns. You didn't see
like some of the best ones. Go see go watch
those two. I know you have access to them. All right, Okay? Done? So, Um,
(02:57):
we're talking cockroaches here and apparently also just through the
body of ventura. Um, did you know, Chuck, the cockroaches
are extremely clean insects. Well always said the same thing
about vultures. They are personally clean. Apparently they do track
(03:17):
a lot of germs spread disease. They apparently leave a
trail of fecal material everywhere they go, because it's like
a bit of bread crumbs for them to follow back.
They spread bacteria, of course, in that fecal material. Um,
there are proteins that set off up to six of
allergy sufferers allergies. They'll eat garbage and waste, they'll they'll
(03:40):
crawl on poop that your dog laid down in the
yard and eat it if your dog doesn't need it first.
And yet a cockroach itself is very clean because they're
extremely um intense groomers. First of all, they keep their
antenna clean because they have fatty secretion or some sort
(04:02):
of secretion that if they don't clean it off, we'll
block their antenna from sensing things. So they constantly clean
their antenna. But apparently they also clean their feet and everything.
And I read about a study. It was pretty almost anecdotal,
it was so outside of the scientific method. But um,
they took a swab from a guy's hands who hadn't
(04:24):
washed his hands for two hours, and they took a
swab off of the foot or tarsus, i should say,
of a cockroach who had been walking through garbage, and
then two hours later, they took a swab and um,
they put it in culture and the guy grew way
more bacteria than the cockroaches culture did. I don't care,
(04:45):
which means that that man is dirty year than a cockroach.
They proved it. I would still smash the cockroach with
my flip flop. See. I don't believe there's a there's
a sect out there, and I don't know if it's
Hinduism or Jainism. It's one of those two where the
the monks of this sect um carry little brooms hand
(05:06):
brooms to kind of brush everything off wherever they sit
so they don't accidentally kill even the tiniest I think
that's great, and I kind of agree with that. I
think everything is a right to life. Now, you have
been on record on this very show talking about killing
cockroaches because the way the skitter. No, no, no, not cockroaches.
(05:29):
I am down with killing mosquitoes and ticks. No, you
talked about the cockroaches. I don't kill cockroaches. You talked
very much about how fast they are and how they
skitter and how that freaks you out. I don't kill them. No,
I don't kill roaches. I'm telling you, like I defy
you to find the time stamp. All right, somebody please
help me. Okay. Um, I will kill the crap out
(05:51):
of a mosquito, a cockroach, and um, I will generally
shoe a fly. Now i'll kill lies. I generally won't
kill a fly because they're not a big problem. But
you don't have flies around you all the time now
like me. But um, mosquitoes and cockroaches I will kill.
(06:12):
And that's about it. Yeah, everything else right to life.
Cockroaches you must die. So cockroaches are Um. I guess
they understand that Chuck wants them to die. Many people do.
They're very disliked, which has possibly accounted for them evolving
to be really difficult to kill. For one, they're nocturnal,
(06:34):
so they're hiding away from us when we're up because
we're diurnal. Does the opposite of nocturnal. Yeah. Um, they
have sensors, little sensors in there. Um, we'll get to
that spoiler. They run really fast, they do. They reproduce
extremely quickly. And there's more than four thousand species of cockroach.
(06:57):
So you would think the whole rule would be infested
with cockroach is but not true. It's actually mainly just
one species, the German cockroach, that is h accountable for
most infestations in homes around the world. That's right, that
is one of the four main species that you might see,
the German, the American a k. A. Palmetto bug, which
(07:19):
are big, Oh yeah, man creepy. There's one man that
like in South America. It's like as big as your hand,
six inches lunch, one foot wing diameter wingspan. The brown
banded cocka roach and the oriental cocka roach um are
the four that you're likely to come across in your life.
And the German cockroach an American are the ones you're
(07:41):
going to see here in the United States. And they
have been brought here by you because they get that
you know, they're not obviously gonna fly from continent. In
the continent, they hit tribes on airplanes and boats and
getting chipping containers and in your mouth, moving boxes and
ghosery bags, and they are ubiquitous, and they, like all
(08:03):
insects are most insects, they do a service. Most of
them are going to be out in the woods like
chewing stuff and pooping it out and being a part
of the ecosystem um. But it's the ones in the
home that really freaked people out right, And Chuck, I
think one of the more fascinating things. And by the way,
Rod just turned out to be pretty fascinating, even more
(08:23):
than I expect him. I just thought there were a
few things that were fascinating where you creeped out, like
reading this or do so it's not like that you
just hate them, Yeah, I mean there, it's like you
previously talked about that you deny. It's the way they
move and how fast they are is what creeps me out.
And like, there's no greater fear than laying in bed
(08:44):
and seeing one on the ceiling above you, just waiting
for it to fall into your mouth. Yeah, but apparently
they are pretty good at not falling off of the ceiling.
That's true. Um, And they've had a long time to
practice this kind of stuff. They've been around for about
three twenty million years, longer than dinosaurs, way longer than
(09:05):
dinosas they survived that extinction event they did, and well
let's talk about it, Chuck. Just how much of an
extinction event can a cockroach survive? Can they survive a
nuclear fallout, a nuclear war that would kill all humans?
Could a cockroach survive as they are rumored to. Uh
maybe that's sadly, it's like we don't know because that
(09:29):
hasn't happened. Not sadly, thankfully that hasn't happened. But um,
the answer is some people say maybe, some people say
maybe not. Um. What we definitely know is they probably
could not survive the nuclear winter because they like warm,
moist places and the nuclear winter would not be good
for cockroaches. Apparently they're less susceptible the radiation poisoning and
(09:53):
humans are, but more than most insects. So as far
as insects goes, they might not be the best candidate, right,
Uh yeah, so maybe, but probably not. I'm kind of
on that side that they probably wouldn't survive a nuclear war,
so we're talking about radiation though not like the blast
obviously that would kill everything, you know. Um, alright, so
(10:16):
they survived the dinosaurs extinction event. They have been around
for three million years. They are very hearty little insects.
Let's talk a little bit about their bodies. They're creepy,
little crunchy bodies. So, um, most of them are between
two inch half an inch and two inches long. They're
(10:37):
brown or black usually and that length is minus their
intended that's just their bodieside, you don't and their heads
point downward like as Tracy Wilson, who wrote this article
points out, almost as if they're built for ramming or
just searching for stuff. You know, it's another way to
look at it. The males are the ones that have wings.
Females may have wings, but their vestigial wings they can't
(10:57):
fly with them. Males can fly not very well though,
which makes them even more horrific when a palmetal bug,
a big one is flying at your face because you
know he has no control exactly. Yeah, it's sort of
like the cicada. Like they're I don't think their wind
wings were made for flying, but if they jump off
of something high, they can help them a little bit,
(11:18):
uh to glide perhaps and not like hit the ground
is hard um short distances basically, and their their insects,
which means that they have three main body regions, the head,
the thorax, and the abdomen. They have an exoskeleton that
they molt as they grow, and they mold a number
of times, depending on the cockroach species, over the course
(11:40):
of a couple of weeks or over the course of
a couple of years, and their lifespans also are um
uh in step with that molting schedule. Um. But they
cockroach will mold several times over its life before it
becomes an adult. Yes, and when they molt, um, it's
the same thing as when they're born. They're gonna look
white and um that's probably kind of creepy looking. I've
never seen a molted cockroach like a skinless cockroach. It's
(12:02):
like the lady in hell raizor before she uh and uh.
They're they're pretty susceptible to injury and death obviously when
but when after they've molted before bursicon, which is a hormone,
makes their exoskeleton hard and dark once again. Then they
have their little armor um, which is no match for
(12:24):
a flip flop by uh. They can regrow lost limbs
when it molts, which is pretty cool, and they can
even put molting off for a little while in order
to regrow a lost limb. Um in their head. Let's
go over their head. They have eyes and their antenna,
which we've talked about, which we'll get into more specifically.
And there Tracy loves saying mouth parts. Yeah, she writes
(12:46):
a lot of these articles. Yeah, she she will never
just say mouths. Yeah, it's not a true mouth apparently,
it's yeah, a mouth part. Yeah. They do have brains,
by the way, and they are the brain is in
the head, but the brain is not like a human
or a mammal brain. It's not doing it's like it's
not connected to a big central nervous system or anything
(13:06):
like that. Right, there is a central nervous system that
it's not in the head. Um. There's a h it's
some sort of ganglia um that allows the roach to
continue living for up to a week after it loses
its head. Yeah. This is a pretty good roach fact. Okay,
I think okay, Um, So you can cut a roach
his head off and it will live for a week
(13:27):
and do all the normal things that a roach does
for a week, and then when it finally dies, it
dies because of thirst. Yeah, yeah, because they they actually breathe.
They don't breathe through the nose and mouth. They breathe
through their sides. There's little holes in their side called
spiricles and trachea tubes deliver the oxygen to the organs
and tissues through their sides. So there's you know, cut
(13:50):
off the head and it just dies of thirst. Yeah,
which is my new favorite game. Actually that's not true
because that's like future serial killer stuff. It is like
you torture cockroaches, and you torture animals, and you torture humans.
Once you've moved down to the chipmunks, it's probably beyond
the point of no return. You're a bad person. Jeffrey
Dahmer tortured animals. He would lay down and uh like
(14:14):
he would come across a dead deer in the forest
and like lay down with it and spoon with it.
It's like a Johnny Depp and Dead Man. Did he
do that? Did the exact same thing? Well, maybe he
was a serial killer. I don't think he was. He
was a killer, but done a serial killer. That just
shows how messed up Dahmer was that man. Yeah, to
like that was a connection to him, was like holding
(14:35):
this dead animal, all right, like the cockroaches. Um, so
(15:12):
that's the head. Yeah, let's talk about their eyes. Their
eyes are compound eyes. Um. So they see the world
in a mosaic like a fly. Like a fly, all right,
So we talked about their eyes. I actually asked Tracy today,
I was like, you you wrote a bunch of insect articles.
Didn't you ever get sick about talking about the head,
(15:35):
the abdomin, the thorax, mouthparts, the legs. They're all the
same for insects, No, they're not. They all have these
they're all the same, but they all have different little
adaptations that make them different. I was like, how did
you not get tired of it? She said, she was
fascinated the whole time. She said, san x, that's trable, nit,
(15:55):
that's tracy of stuff you miss in history class. By
the way, plug plug. Um, So we talked about the antenna.
They are movable and they are known as antennal flagella,
and uh, they're actually tiny, tiny little hair covered segments
and like it's it's thicker where it attaches at the head,
and it gets thinner and thinner and thinner until it's
(16:17):
just like a human hair almost at the end. And
these things since, um, they smell sort of right, Yeah,
they basically I guess, uh sense pheromones. Yeah, the there
you have it. They sense pheromones, They pick up odors.
I think they they're pretty finally tuned to the environment. Yeah,
(16:38):
but that's like really how they're getting around, right, Like
even though they have eyes, isn't the antenna really the secret?
I believe? So okay, um, chuck, you want to talk
about mouth parts? Yes, Um. They are a lot different
than mammals, as Tracy points out, Um, but they do
have parts that sort of are akin to how mammal's
(16:59):
mouth work. For instance, there's a laborum and labium and
they form the lips. Uh. Mandibles, there's two of those,
and they cut and grind things like your teeth might,
which is very important because roaches eat literally anything. Yeah,
and sometimes that's like wood and other stuff like they
shouldn't be able to eat, but they can. That's right,
(17:21):
go ahead, thanks to the mandibles and some other things
that we'll get to. Uh. And then they have to stop.
And then there's a couple of maxilla, and they basically
manipulate the food chewing. Yeah, like a squirrel, Yeah, squirrels
arms or hands, yeah, or a dung beetle. Yeah. The thorax,
(17:44):
which is one of the body parts that one of
the three pieces of the body um, and that has
the three pairs of legs and the wings and the
legs are so named after the part of the thorax
that they're attached to right, So you get the pro,
the mezzo, and meta. So the pro is closest to
the head mezzo middle. Yeah, the pro are like the
(18:06):
brakes apparently, and the yeah, the pro Yeah, that's they
just do stopping. Yeah, the middle ones can make the
roach go forward or backward. And then so that's the
mesothoracic legs. Then the metathoracic legs. The ones in the
rear are the ones that propel the roach forward. And
here's another good roach fact. You take this one. Man
is awesome. Uh, they can move about fifty body links
(18:28):
in a second, which is up to three miles an hour.
Sounds very slow to us, but think about this in
roach terms. That's right. If that were a human being, Uh,
that would mean we would be running two hundred miles
an hour. Yeah, that's why they look so fast. It's
because they are hard. They are fast. Now, like to us,
three miles an hour is not that much but very
slow walk. That equals two hundred miles an hour in
(18:50):
reality for us. Yeah, and part two of that roach fact,
which I think is just horrifying. When a roach runs
really really fast, sometimes it gets air and just is
basically running on its back legs only, but the front
the other legs are still moving. So that's just like
my worst nightmare. They're coming after you, exactly, man. So
(19:14):
they the three pairs are all built the exact same
They all have the same parts, but they are different lengths.
They function slightly differently. Um, but they all moved the
same way. It just depends on, you know, what the
roach wants to do. Like we said, the pro thorastic
legs active breaks. The mesothorastic um can move it forward
(19:34):
or back, and then the meta push it forward and
and they apparently move like poco sticks and then back
and forth too, and they work in conjunction to allow
the roach to kind of walk over just about anything. So, um,
when the the pro and meta thoracic legs on one
(19:57):
side are moving, the meso thor ascic leg the middle
one on the other side is moving. So that's how
they move, which apparently it's a little a TV. It's
like a four by four. Yeah, what's that? Uh. She
also points out that there are, um the parts of
the leg you can sort of approximate as if it
were a human. They have a tricnter that's like our
(20:19):
knees uh femur. An tibia um resemble arthai and shins,
and then they have the tarsus, which is the ankle
and foot right, and the tarsus is hooked in a roach,
which allows it to walk on the ceiling over your head,
most frightening thing ever, and on walls. And when a
(20:39):
roaches on the ground, it runs very quickly, but when
it's on a ceiling, it moves much more methodically because
it doesn't want to follow them upside down. Yea, if
three miles an hour equals two an hour to us, yeah,
imagine what a ten ft drop equals to a poor
little roach. Well, not enough, because it lands, flips itself over,
(21:00):
and then runs away again. But it's humiliated, that's true.
Uh twenty seven times per second, these legs can move
back and forth. So these are fast, fast little boogers,
which is why you previously talked about hating them because
they were so fast. I really I don't I'm gonna
find it. Okay, I'll bet I didn't say I'd kill him.
(21:21):
I've long advocated for road to his rights, all right,
So now we're the abdomen um. They do have a heart.
It is a tool instructure and does move blood along,
but it does not carry um oxygen around, so A,
the blood is not red, and B they move oxygen
(21:43):
and blood around in other ways through basically empty spaces
called hemo hemo coles. Yeah, it's pretty much the absence
of a fact there. Yeah, well it's in the air
to carries blood around to the organs. But yeah, she says,
the blood just travels through these spaces. And then rather
than having to worry about like a spare tire or
something like that, I like a fat belly. Right, they
(22:06):
have a actual fat body and it's just this little
area where they store all the fat in their body.
Very smart. I have that same place. It's between my
chin and my waist. Yeah. I guess they do have
to worry about a spare tire, but it's a very
specific one. Yeah, that's true, you know. Okay, so let's
(22:27):
talk about digestion um. The the digestive system is in
the abdomen, and it's really not super unlike it's just
like a simplified version of our own or any mammals
digestive system. But like you said, they can eat things
like in digestings like wood and cellulose, so they do
need some help from specialized parts, one of which is
(22:48):
called a crop. Right, that's um it basically holds the
food while apart behind it um a toothy section in
the digestive. So that is gross. And it's equal to
like a an octopus having a beak, crushing beak. They're squishy,
(23:08):
they're not supposed to have a hard beak in the middle.
It's crazy. Yeah, it's called a probe and triculus on
the roach, and that just pulverizes the stuff like wood
or whatever it's tough to digest, and then and then
it pushes it back. This this pulverized part to the
gastric cassilla, which houses enzymes, microbes, things that break it
down even further. And all this is just the preliminary stuff.
(23:30):
This is like what we do in our mouth. Um.
All this is going through this process in a roach
before it even gets to the part where it starts
to digest. This this is sort of gross, like the digestion.
When I was we haven't said the word bolus yet, Well,
we just did. Uh. And then the searcy that we
talked about earlier. These are the uh. It sort of
(23:55):
looks like short little antenna sticking out from the butt
area on each side. And this is what allows the
roach to not get like whenever you go to get
that flip flop and you rare back and go to
hit the roach and as you're coming in, it just
like darts out of the way. You're like, how did
it know? How did it know? It's because the searcy
they pick up on air flow and they can actually
(24:17):
feel and since that shoe coming. So if you're if
you're unto killing roaches like me, you have to be
swift and and stealthy and come at it hard and
with vigor and with a I guess a paddle that
has holes in it? Hey maybe so drag you might
be honest something there. Oh no, you invented sharknado. So
(24:40):
the roach paddle? Um so, I guess. So that's a roach.
That's the roach's body. Let's talk about reproduction, because they
do reproduce depending on the species. Um. I believe the
German roach uh can produce something in the order of
(25:03):
like eighty thousand offspring? Is that correct? No? Way more
than that. The German produces three the German cockroach and
it's offspring will eventually produce about three hundred thousand per year.
So a mother and her her kids. Yeah, like that,
the family tree from that one cockroach will eventually number
(25:24):
three hundred thousand in a year. Right, But think about this,
Then one of those kids and then her offspring will
be another three hundred thousand. Now I think that counts.
I think that's the whole Okay, Well, then one of
those three hundred thousand, we'll have more kids and another
(25:44):
three hundred thousands. It goes exponentially kicks in somewhere. Exponentiality
kicks in at some point. Yeah, an American cockroaches only
produce about eight hundred babies a year. So I got
something from Believe it or Not. The orcan website has
a out of really good scientific information. Uh. Did you
go and look at it? Uh? And they talked about
(26:05):
female courtship. Um. They begin courtship, it says, by raising
their wings and exposing their internal membranes and expanding their
genital chamber. Hey, boys, out internal membrane exactly. My genital
chamber is wide open and ready. I'm gonna release a pheromone.
(26:25):
Hey man, this is science, this is science. They released
the pheromones to attract males, and um, that's the calling position.
And then the males that pick up on these pheromones
approached the female, they flap their wings a little bit
to say, hey, I like what you got cooking there,
and then mating commences. It says when a male cockroach
(26:47):
backs into a female cockroach and deposits sperm so little,
a little like you know, it's from the rear to
the rear. You know what I'm saying. Let's go back
to reproduction. Yeah, we used to be really good at
stuff like this. And by the way, wasps, well, actually
(27:07):
there's just a side note. Wasps will actually sting cockroaches
and lay eggs inside of a cockroach like baby Wasps
can be borne out of a cockroach body. Right, They
incubate in the roach and I guess probably eat it
alive from the inside out. There's a movie. I'm just
gonna start saying that about everything. So there's a couple
(27:28):
of ways that a mother roach, once her eggs are fertilized,
can produce offspring um, and a couple of them involves
something with one of the worst words ever in my opinion,
the oothica oh th h e c A. Yeah, the otha.
You've never been to Outhca. It's nice. I prefer Oothica
(27:49):
upstate Uka. So that's basically just like an egg sack
that the eggs develop in. And it can either be
inside the mom, which makes her Oh vo viviparis ovovivi Paris, seriously,
that's the word porous Paris, or it can be on
the outside of her, which makes her over Paris. And
(28:12):
if it's over Paris, then she can just kind of
like abandon the sack, cover it up with some newspaper
or something like that. Sometimes they good luck or some
of them. It depends on the species, carry that around
with them and then actually care for the young after
they're born like the good mom should. And then there's viviparis,
which is basically like eggs developing in fluid like in
(28:36):
a human in the interest and in ovo vivi Paris
and ovivi Paris. I'm sorry viviparis. Yeah you confused yet,
imagine following along with just your ear and I'm looking
at words. So it helps, um the eggs are born
or the young come out live. Yeah, they actually give
birth to little baby cockroaches. So, like we said, the
(29:00):
German cockroach can produce three hundred thousand offspring. The German
cockroach and her offspring can produce three hundred thousand cockroaches
in a year. Um. And then the Americans and we
talked about nymphs. Apparently the nymph when it's born is
(29:21):
fleck of dust size maybe very very small. Um. And
there's a bunch of them, don't forget so. And they're white,
they're waiting to molt. They're very um easy to kill. Yes,
And if you're a common centipede, you love to eat
these things. Imagine seeing that on a microscopic level, a
(29:43):
centipede eating baby cockroaches. There's a movie for you. Um. Also,
here's another good roach fact is some mothers that care
for their offspring after birth. Some of them just you know,
either dump the ka or they just have the babies
and leave, but some actually raise their little babies, and
(30:04):
scientists believe that they the offspring actually recognized the mother. Yeah.
I don't understand why that's so hard to believe. Well,
because it's an insect. Man, it just seems like a
very mammalion there, not even ammalion, just like it doesn't
seem like something from the insect world like, gives them
a heart that I previously didn't believe. I know, I know.
(30:25):
Up with cockroaches, I don't know. It just puts a
face on them that I never really considered as I
smashed them, because you can't see their face. That's right,
um and cockroaches. If you want to make them a
little more um humanlike, a little more personable, give that
the little hat in a cane. There's social Oh yeah,
(30:47):
they're they're not They're they're related to termites, it turns out.
And actually, I've read a fascinating fact. I read one
of the best magazine articles I've ever read in my life,
and I've read a lot of magazine articles in the
most recent issue I believe it was of Harper's and
it's about ten Ways to Satisfy your Man. No, it's early.
It's an article about the early mycologists who discovered westerners,
(31:10):
I should say, who discovered and making air quotes like
magic mushrooms, and in between that time and the time
they became outlawed, and then what happened after they became outlawed,
and how they are all these outlaw like fungal experts
who all had like PhDs and doctorates. But we're also like,
might as well have just been bikers growing these huge
(31:32):
crops of mushrooms. Um, and there's a murder involved in
all that. But there's this it's an awesome article, check
it out. But um, there's this one fact in there
that there's a type of fungus that has evolved to
mimic termite eggs so perfectly that it can fool a
termite into thinking it's her own eggs. And termites um
(31:53):
salivate on their eggs, they keep them moist constantly. Um,
and this fungus needs to be kept moist, so it'll
be moist by a termite that thinks this fungus is
one of her eggs. Does that fungus then later on
kill the termite? Probably? Okay, because that would be I
believe that's irony, even though we've been told we misused
that word. Thanks for the ride, lady. Um, Wow, we
(32:16):
should do one of termites. Okay. Well, I say that
because apparently road eggs need to be kept moist as well.
Yes they do. I don't know. Do they regurgitate on
them to do so? They them? Well, another way they're
related to termites are they like to hang out together.
They like to live in groups where they differ as
termites actually have sort of like bees, to have very
(32:37):
specific roles in their colonies and a social structure that's
very organized. Cockroaches ain't like that. They ain't like that,
but they still like to hang out with one another.
And um, they actually make decisions like collectively together on
where they want to roost, you know, which is an
emergent system, right, I think so is that what that's called. Yeah,
(33:00):
they've done studies where they found, um, like big large
numbers of cockroaches, if they don't have enough space, actually
divide up evenly. Yeah, into like the smallest number of
spaces they can go, like, well, there's two hundred of us,
so let's divide up into three groups and go to
three different places and you go, you guys go there,
we'll go there, and we'll go here, right, and there's
(33:20):
always one dude cockroach out. It's like, what about me?
It would be a Pixar movie. Yeah, that's a good one. Um.
They're they're also social and that they follow one another,
although not necessarily a leader, but I guess whoever they
think has the best idea. That's the collective conscious. Yes,
(33:41):
And there was a group of scientists that created something
called in spots and it is a robotic cockroach and
they codd it with cockroach pheromones and introduced it to
a colony of roaches that accepted it. And then they
started to mess with the roaches. Of course, they had
um in spot lead them out into daylight so that
(34:04):
they abandoned their nocturnality. Um, they would wander out in
the open following this thing. He got him to move
um and he brought them fire. Oh really, man, I
was like, this is getting good. That reminds me of
the I know I talked about Errol Morris at nausea.
(34:24):
But fast, cheap and out of control is uh. The
robot scientists makes robots that mimic cockroaches and other small bugs.
That's really neat. And he said, one potential application one
day is to have like to imagine like thousands of
these that clean things, like these robot bugs that you own.
Well you just like hit a button and like two
(34:44):
hundred of them dust your television and then go back
to their little place. It's pretty neat. It's like scrubbing bubbles. Yeah,
or like the X files when it when across the TV. Yeah,
that rots wasn't cleaning anything though, what's scrubbing bubbles? It's
like a type of cleaner, it is. Yeah, all right,
is that a plug? I don't think so. Okay, it
was just a free association, all right. So let's get
(35:07):
to let's say you're like me and not like Josh,
and you don't want roaches in your home. I don't
want roaches in my home. It's just when I see
a roach, I will, I will gingerly pick it up
with a paper towel and toss it outside. I don't
at all, it doesn't okay, No, no, I don't squeeze
it at all. I just very gently, like, al right,
(35:30):
what happens if that roach like gets free and crawls
up your arm? Up your Okay, but I hopefully I'm
doing it outside, all right. I just want to see
where it stops. I'm trying to get a feel out
your position fully. Um yeah, if if it's injured, if
I accidentally injure it, I'll go ahead and kill it. Okay.
(35:50):
Well that's really you're quite the humanitarian or insectarian insectaria.
So let's say you don't want roaches in your house,
which is pretty much everybody. They say, the first thing
to do is try and seal it off. Good luck
with that, because roaches can fit into cracks that are
as small as one six of an inch one point
five millimeters. And just show me a house that doesn't
(36:13):
have or at least maybe some new houses, you might
have some luck. But if you live in an old
house like me, there's there's always cracks. Like animals can
get through these cracks. So if you realize you've got
a bunch of cracks, seal them up as best you can. Yeah,
But if that's still not doing the trick. Um, they
say that you want to go with a bait trap, yeah,
(36:36):
rather than a spray, because you when you use a
bait trap, you become like a pioneer tracker. Um. You
can put the trap somewhere and if it's not attracting
roaches even though you know you have roaches, Um, then
you need to move your trap. And when you move
your trap and start of tracking roaches, then you can
tell where you're coming from. Then you can seal up
(36:57):
those cracks. That's right. You you come to know the
roaches using the traps with a spray. It's just like
you're just spraying blindly. Can we do one in fleas
or just ticks? Just ticks. We need to do fleas too,
because I have battle fleas. UM. They say, don't use like,
don't waste your money on those sound devices. They say,
this don't work. That emit like some like a sound
(37:19):
that only a roach can hear. Um. You want to
keep your house clean? Yeah, keep your house clean anyway, Tracy. Uh.
If you've ever seen The Simpsons where margin Homer lose
the kids and have to go take a parenting class,
that's that this paragraph reminds me of. How about you
loop up after every meal exactly, clean and seal all
(37:40):
of your food, or cover and seal it. Wipe down
counters and tables after eating, Sweeper mop your floor after cooking.
Eat only in your dining area. I guess if you
eat over your sink, run the water afterward to clean
out any crumbs that may have dropped out of your mouth. Um.
(38:01):
And as a last resort, you could use poisons, but
I would never recommend that putting poisons in your household. Um.
You can always call your friendly neighborhood exterminator and they'll
take care of it for you, sure you know, Or
you can call an in spot and he can lead
all the concerts is out like the pie piper. There
(38:23):
are a few natural things though, Yeah, some things have
been shown to work. Nepa talk tone. It's in two
forms of catting up. So if you have a cat,
you might just kill two birds with one stone um
a sineole sine ala um also known as eucalyptole, and
(38:44):
that is in bay leaf and then ossage orange oil.
And they don't know what in that is the magic potion,
but apparently that works. Yeah, so if you're into natural
you could try some of those things. Just put bay
leaves and catting up all over the place, see what happens,
and or toil and you'll never have a roach again.
Or you can just clean up your house. I don't
(39:05):
see many roaches. It's good. I mean, I'm surprised with
the amount of moisture and how all my house is
and how like the fact that I eat all over
my house and spill things everywhere, you know, garbage laying around.
It's like gum stick to your floor. Yeah, but I
don't see roaches much. When I do. I have my
friend in the foot flop, I'm sure you do, and
coming soon the roach paddle. Yeah, I see. I don't
(39:27):
feel as bad because, especially after I saw those reproductive figures,
I'm not putting a dent in the roach population. Yeah,
I can tell you the ones that you're killing. Care
I don't. I don't know. It's sorry to tell. With
their brains since smashed on the bottom of man. Well,
if you want to learn more about cockroaches, you can
(39:48):
type that word into the search bar how stuff works
dot com and it'll bring up this fine article. And
I said a search bar, which means it's time for
message break. Yeah, this is from an Englishman who went
(40:08):
up a hill and came down a mountain. That's not true.
Self experimenter though when I was a kid. Guy's about
eighteen actually, And notice that when you get water up
your nose, the effect is all consuming. Can't seem to
think about anything, feel anything, or do anything except think
about that water that you just sniffed up your footer.
(40:30):
He's English at a similar thought about what happens to you,
both psychologically and physically when you get soap in your
eye because that stinging sensation and the resulting fevered knuckling
of the optic cavity, for is, for a short time,
the only thing in the universe. So while it's slaying
in the bathtub with the reflected sunlight sparkling through the
(40:50):
red tint of my closed eyes, contemplating this phenomena, I
decided to run my own experiment. I want to know
which of these all powerful sensations would eclipse the other.
So I got a nice big chunk of soap on
one finger and simultaneously rubbed it vigorously into my eye
and ducked under the water, sniffing in deeply. The result was,
(41:13):
as you can imagine, quite horrific. I must have looked
like I was being fatally electrocuted. I thrashed and rubbed
and coughed and cried. My final conclusion, are you dying
to know what happened? Was that, unbelievably both experiences behaved
in some sort of quantum mechanical way where I was
all consumed by two separate, all consuming events at the
(41:34):
same time. So basically, it sucked really bad if you
shared this information with the world. However, no one else
will ever have to suffer this hitherto undocumented facet of reality,
right because that kind regards James Holmes, not the maniac version.
Did he say that? Unneth? He have the signature that
(41:55):
was parenthetical? Yeah, from Manchester, England. So James, I don't
know why you do such a thing, sir, but I
raise a pint to you, Okayny and thanks? Yeah? Um,
isn't there like a whole movement like M plus one
or any equals one? The an equals one movement. It's
like self experimentation and is the study population? And so
(42:17):
if any equals one, there's just one person yourself. Yeah.
I don't know about sniffing water and putting soap in
your eyes. But he was a kid. He was only eighteen, right, James, Right, yeah, James,
not the maniac version. Thanks James. If you, uh anyone
else out there have a cool self experiment that you've done,
we want to hear about that all the time. Concorde
(42:40):
story too. Sure, let us know, I agreed. Um. You
can tweet to us at s Y s K podcast.
You can join us on Facebook dot com slash stuff
you Should Know, and you can join us at our
home on the web, our website Stuff you should Know
dot com or more on this and thousands of other topics,
(43:02):
visit how stuff Works dot com, m
Come to stuff you should know from house Stuff work
stocks dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. And
I'm Josh Clark and Charles W. Chuck Bryant is with me.
He's got his glasses on, he's got his hair shorn,
his fingernails are chewed down to the quick. He's ready
to go. I was hoping we could open the show
(00:23):
with lakukaracha playing in the background. Well, oh yeah, we can't.
I don't know if we can or not. I can't know.
There's no way we can't. Well, hold on, let's let's
humme it. We could probably do that, right, that's wayne.
People just imagine in your heads that you're sipping a
margharita and some mariachi band is playing lukukaracha right now.
Not to be confused with tequila, no, which is similar.
(00:46):
Now I always confused it too, really well, not want
to hear him, but like if I think of la
kukaracha like I often think of Peewee dancing on the bar,
then I'm like, oh, yeah, this tequila. But you know
what Luca lookukarat is about out. I assumed cockroaches, but
probably not. No, a cockroach who has lost one of
his legs and it's having a hard time. I just
(01:08):
found that out today. I did not know that. Look
at me. I didn't either until like just a few
hours ago, Chuck, I was once like, you naive to
the way of Kaa. Alright, so we talked about lakukaratas
you'd hoped you feel good. Yeah, have you ever seen
the X Files episode with the cockroaches. I don't know. Oh,
(01:31):
it is perfect. It's one of the top five. And
it's not even like a part of it, part of
the big bigger picture once, it's like its own thing. Yeah,
they have the name for those episodes. I can't remember
what it's called. But like when it's just about a
shape shift or and it has nothing to do with
the overarching conspiracy. Yeah, it's one of those, and it's
(01:51):
just about cockroaches and a cockroach infestation may or may
not exist. But at one point, like it's getting really
like the cockroaches are everywhere and like everybody's starting to
go a little crazy and all that, and they they
m digitized the cockroach like crawling across your TV screen
like obviously not part of the scene, and it looks
(02:11):
like it was on your screen. So like, you're it
looks like there's a cockroach in your house. It was,
it was, It's a good episode. Yeah, I was late
on the X Files. I didn't watch it when it
was out. And then when I moved to New Jersey
they started doing reruns and Justin I was living at
the time, was like, you never watched X Files. It
was like no, And then it was on every night.
(02:33):
I watched the crap out of it that did you
see the Charles Nelson Riley one where he's like an artist?
It's jose Chunks from outer Space? Remember where like could
Jessie the Body Venture and Alex Trebecker in it? Really,
I didn't know. I must not have seen them all
because I was catching them on reruns. You didn't see
like some of the best ones. Go see go watch
those two. I know you have access to them. All right, Okay? Done? So, Um,
(02:57):
we're talking cockroaches here and apparently also just through the
body of ventura. Um, did you know, Chuck, the cockroaches
are extremely clean insects. Well always said the same thing
about vultures. They are personally clean. Apparently they do track
(03:17):
a lot of germs spread disease. They apparently leave a
trail of fecal material everywhere they go, because it's like
a bit of bread crumbs for them to follow back.
They spread bacteria, of course, in that fecal material. Um,
there are proteins that set off up to six of
allergy sufferers allergies. They'll eat garbage and waste, they'll they'll
(03:40):
crawl on poop that your dog laid down in the
yard and eat it if your dog doesn't need it first.
And yet a cockroach itself is very clean because they're
extremely um intense groomers. First of all, they keep their
antenna clean because they have fatty secretion or some sort
(04:02):
of secretion that if they don't clean it off, we'll
block their antenna from sensing things. So they constantly clean
their antenna. But apparently they also clean their feet and everything.
And I read about a study. It was pretty almost anecdotal,
it was so outside of the scientific method. But um,
they took a swab from a guy's hands who hadn't
(04:24):
washed his hands for two hours, and they took a
swab off of the foot or tarsus, i should say,
of a cockroach who had been walking through garbage, and
then two hours later, they took a swab and um,
they put it in culture and the guy grew way
more bacteria than the cockroaches culture did. I don't care,
(04:45):
which means that that man is dirty year than a cockroach.
They proved it. I would still smash the cockroach with
my flip flop. See. I don't believe there's a there's
a sect out there, and I don't know if it's
Hinduism or Jainism. It's one of those two where the
the monks of this sect um carry little brooms hand
(05:06):
brooms to kind of brush everything off wherever they sit
so they don't accidentally kill even the tiniest I think
that's great, and I kind of agree with that. I
think everything is a right to life. Now, you have
been on record on this very show talking about killing
cockroaches because the way the skitter. No, no, no, not cockroaches.
(05:29):
I am down with killing mosquitoes and ticks. No, you
talked about the cockroaches. I don't kill cockroaches. You talked
very much about how fast they are and how they
skitter and how that freaks you out. I don't kill them. No,
I don't kill roaches. I'm telling you, like I defy
you to find the time stamp. All right, somebody please
help me. Okay. Um, I will kill the crap out
(05:51):
of a mosquito, a cockroach, and um, I will generally
shoe a fly. Now i'll kill lies. I generally won't
kill a fly because they're not a big problem. But
you don't have flies around you all the time now
like me. But um, mosquitoes and cockroaches I will kill.
(06:12):
And that's about it. Yeah, everything else right to life.
Cockroaches you must die. So cockroaches are Um. I guess
they understand that Chuck wants them to die. Many people do.
They're very disliked, which has possibly accounted for them evolving
to be really difficult to kill. For one, they're nocturnal,
(06:34):
so they're hiding away from us when we're up because
we're diurnal. Does the opposite of nocturnal. Yeah. Um, they
have sensors, little sensors in there. Um, we'll get to
that spoiler. They run really fast, they do. They reproduce
extremely quickly. And there's more than four thousand species of cockroach.
(06:57):
So you would think the whole rule would be infested
with cockroach is but not true. It's actually mainly just
one species, the German cockroach, that is h accountable for
most infestations in homes around the world. That's right, that
is one of the four main species that you might see,
the German, the American a k. A. Palmetto bug, which
(07:19):
are big, Oh yeah, man creepy. There's one man that
like in South America. It's like as big as your hand,
six inches lunch, one foot wing diameter wingspan. The brown
banded cocka roach and the oriental cocka roach um are
the four that you're likely to come across in your life.
And the German cockroach an American are the ones you're
(07:41):
going to see here in the United States. And they
have been brought here by you because they get that
you know, they're not obviously gonna fly from continent. In
the continent, they hit tribes on airplanes and boats and
getting chipping containers and in your mouth, moving boxes and
ghosery bags, and they are ubiquitous, and they, like all
(08:03):
insects are most insects, they do a service. Most of
them are going to be out in the woods like
chewing stuff and pooping it out and being a part
of the ecosystem um. But it's the ones in the
home that really freaked people out right, And Chuck, I
think one of the more fascinating things. And by the way,
Rod just turned out to be pretty fascinating, even more
(08:23):
than I expect him. I just thought there were a
few things that were fascinating where you creeped out, like
reading this or do so it's not like that you
just hate them, Yeah, I mean there, it's like you
previously talked about that you deny. It's the way they
move and how fast they are is what creeps me out.
And like, there's no greater fear than laying in bed
(08:44):
and seeing one on the ceiling above you, just waiting
for it to fall into your mouth. Yeah, but apparently
they are pretty good at not falling off of the ceiling.
That's true. Um, And they've had a long time to
practice this kind of stuff. They've been around for about
three twenty million years, longer than dinosaurs, way longer than
(09:05):
dinosas they survived that extinction event they did, and well
let's talk about it, Chuck. Just how much of an
extinction event can a cockroach survive? Can they survive a
nuclear fallout, a nuclear war that would kill all humans?
Could a cockroach survive as they are rumored to. Uh
maybe that's sadly, it's like we don't know because that
(09:29):
hasn't happened. Not sadly, thankfully that hasn't happened. But um,
the answer is some people say maybe, some people say
maybe not. Um. What we definitely know is they probably
could not survive the nuclear winter because they like warm,
moist places and the nuclear winter would not be good
for cockroaches. Apparently they're less susceptible the radiation poisoning and
(09:53):
humans are, but more than most insects. So as far
as insects goes, they might not be the best candidate, right,
Uh yeah, so maybe, but probably not. I'm kind of
on that side that they probably wouldn't survive a nuclear war,
so we're talking about radiation though not like the blast
obviously that would kill everything, you know. Um, alright, so
(10:16):
they survived the dinosaurs extinction event. They have been around
for three million years. They are very hearty little insects.
Let's talk a little bit about their bodies. They're creepy,
little crunchy bodies. So, um, most of them are between
two inch half an inch and two inches long. They're
(10:37):
brown or black usually and that length is minus their
intended that's just their bodieside, you don't and their heads
point downward like as Tracy Wilson, who wrote this article
points out, almost as if they're built for ramming or
just searching for stuff. You know, it's another way to
look at it. The males are the ones that have wings.
Females may have wings, but their vestigial wings they can't
(10:57):
fly with them. Males can fly not very well though,
which makes them even more horrific when a palmetal bug,
a big one is flying at your face because you
know he has no control exactly. Yeah, it's sort of
like the cicada. Like they're I don't think their wind
wings were made for flying, but if they jump off
of something high, they can help them a little bit,
(11:18):
uh to glide perhaps and not like hit the ground
is hard um short distances basically, and their their insects,
which means that they have three main body regions, the head,
the thorax, and the abdomen. They have an exoskeleton that
they molt as they grow, and they mold a number
of times, depending on the cockroach species, over the course
(11:40):
of a couple of weeks or over the course of
a couple of years, and their lifespans also are um
uh in step with that molting schedule. Um. But they
cockroach will mold several times over its life before it
becomes an adult. Yes, and when they molt, um, it's
the same thing as when they're born. They're gonna look
white and um that's probably kind of creepy looking. I've
never seen a molted cockroach like a skinless cockroach. It's
(12:02):
like the lady in hell raizor before she uh and uh.
They're they're pretty susceptible to injury and death obviously when
but when after they've molted before bursicon, which is a hormone,
makes their exoskeleton hard and dark once again. Then they
have their little armor um, which is no match for
(12:24):
a flip flop by uh. They can regrow lost limbs
when it molts, which is pretty cool, and they can
even put molting off for a little while in order
to regrow a lost limb. Um in their head. Let's
go over their head. They have eyes and their antenna,
which we've talked about, which we'll get into more specifically.
And there Tracy loves saying mouth parts. Yeah, she writes
(12:46):
a lot of these articles. Yeah, she she will never
just say mouths. Yeah, it's not a true mouth apparently,
it's yeah, a mouth part. Yeah. They do have brains,
by the way, and they are the brain is in
the head, but the brain is not like a human
or a mammal brain. It's not doing it's like it's
not connected to a big central nervous system or anything
(13:06):
like that. Right, there is a central nervous system that
it's not in the head. Um. There's a h it's
some sort of ganglia um that allows the roach to
continue living for up to a week after it loses
its head. Yeah. This is a pretty good roach fact. Okay,
I think okay, Um, So you can cut a roach
his head off and it will live for a week
(13:27):
and do all the normal things that a roach does
for a week, and then when it finally dies, it
dies because of thirst. Yeah, yeah, because they they actually breathe.
They don't breathe through the nose and mouth. They breathe
through their sides. There's little holes in their side called
spiricles and trachea tubes deliver the oxygen to the organs
and tissues through their sides. So there's you know, cut
(13:50):
off the head and it just dies of thirst. Yeah,
which is my new favorite game. Actually that's not true
because that's like future serial killer stuff. It is like
you torture cockroaches, and you torture animals, and you torture humans.
Once you've moved down to the chipmunks, it's probably beyond
the point of no return. You're a bad person. Jeffrey
Dahmer tortured animals. He would lay down and uh like
(14:14):
he would come across a dead deer in the forest
and like lay down with it and spoon with it.
It's like a Johnny Depp and Dead Man. Did he
do that? Did the exact same thing? Well, maybe he
was a serial killer. I don't think he was. He
was a killer, but done a serial killer. That just
shows how messed up Dahmer was that man. Yeah, to
like that was a connection to him, was like holding
(14:35):
this dead animal, all right, like the cockroaches. Um, so
(15:12):
that's the head. Yeah, let's talk about their eyes. Their
eyes are compound eyes. Um. So they see the world
in a mosaic like a fly. Like a fly, all right,
So we talked about their eyes. I actually asked Tracy today,
I was like, you you wrote a bunch of insect articles.
Didn't you ever get sick about talking about the head,
(15:35):
the abdomin, the thorax, mouthparts, the legs. They're all the
same for insects, No, they're not. They all have these
they're all the same, but they all have different little
adaptations that make them different. I was like, how did
you not get tired of it? She said, she was
fascinated the whole time. She said, san x, that's trable, nit,
(15:55):
that's tracy of stuff you miss in history class. By
the way, plug plug. Um, So we talked about the antenna.
They are movable and they are known as antennal flagella,
and uh, they're actually tiny, tiny little hair covered segments
and like it's it's thicker where it attaches at the head,
and it gets thinner and thinner and thinner until it's
(16:17):
just like a human hair almost at the end. And
these things since, um, they smell sort of right, Yeah,
they basically I guess, uh sense pheromones. Yeah, the there
you have it. They sense pheromones, They pick up odors.
I think they they're pretty finally tuned to the environment. Yeah,
(16:38):
but that's like really how they're getting around, right, Like
even though they have eyes, isn't the antenna really the secret?
I believe? So okay, um, chuck, you want to talk
about mouth parts? Yes, Um. They are a lot different
than mammals, as Tracy points out, Um, but they do
have parts that sort of are akin to how mammal's
(16:59):
mouth work. For instance, there's a laborum and labium and
they form the lips. Uh. Mandibles, there's two of those,
and they cut and grind things like your teeth might,
which is very important because roaches eat literally anything. Yeah,
and sometimes that's like wood and other stuff like they
shouldn't be able to eat, but they can. That's right,
(17:21):
go ahead, thanks to the mandibles and some other things
that we'll get to. Uh. And then they have to stop.
And then there's a couple of maxilla, and they basically
manipulate the food chewing. Yeah, like a squirrel, Yeah, squirrels
arms or hands, yeah, or a dung beetle. Yeah. The thorax,
(17:44):
which is one of the body parts that one of
the three pieces of the body um, and that has
the three pairs of legs and the wings and the
legs are so named after the part of the thorax
that they're attached to right, So you get the pro,
the mezzo, and meta. So the pro is closest to
the head mezzo middle. Yeah, the pro are like the
(18:06):
brakes apparently, and the yeah, the pro Yeah, that's they
just do stopping. Yeah, the middle ones can make the
roach go forward or backward. And then so that's the
mesothoracic legs. Then the metathoracic legs. The ones in the
rear are the ones that propel the roach forward. And
here's another good roach fact. You take this one. Man
is awesome. Uh, they can move about fifty body links
(18:28):
in a second, which is up to three miles an hour.
Sounds very slow to us, but think about this in
roach terms. That's right. If that were a human being, Uh,
that would mean we would be running two hundred miles
an hour. Yeah, that's why they look so fast. It's
because they are hard. They are fast. Now, like to us,
three miles an hour is not that much but very
slow walk. That equals two hundred miles an hour in
(18:50):
reality for us. Yeah, and part two of that roach fact,
which I think is just horrifying. When a roach runs
really really fast, sometimes it gets air and just is
basically running on its back legs only, but the front
the other legs are still moving. So that's just like
my worst nightmare. They're coming after you, exactly, man. So
(19:14):
they the three pairs are all built the exact same
They all have the same parts, but they are different lengths.
They function slightly differently. Um, but they all moved the
same way. It just depends on, you know, what the
roach wants to do. Like we said, the pro thorastic
legs active breaks. The mesothorastic um can move it forward
(19:34):
or back, and then the meta push it forward and
and they apparently move like poco sticks and then back
and forth too, and they work in conjunction to allow
the roach to kind of walk over just about anything. So, um,
when the the pro and meta thoracic legs on one
(19:57):
side are moving, the meso thor ascic leg the middle
one on the other side is moving. So that's how
they move, which apparently it's a little a TV. It's
like a four by four. Yeah, what's that? Uh. She
also points out that there are, um the parts of
the leg you can sort of approximate as if it
were a human. They have a tricnter that's like our
(20:19):
knees uh femur. An tibia um resemble arthai and shins,
and then they have the tarsus, which is the ankle
and foot right, and the tarsus is hooked in a roach,
which allows it to walk on the ceiling over your head,
most frightening thing ever, and on walls. And when a
(20:39):
roaches on the ground, it runs very quickly, but when
it's on a ceiling, it moves much more methodically because
it doesn't want to follow them upside down. Yea, if
three miles an hour equals two an hour to us, yeah,
imagine what a ten ft drop equals to a poor
little roach. Well, not enough, because it lands, flips itself over,
(21:00):
and then runs away again. But it's humiliated, that's true.
Uh twenty seven times per second, these legs can move
back and forth. So these are fast, fast little boogers,
which is why you previously talked about hating them because
they were so fast. I really I don't I'm gonna
find it. Okay, I'll bet I didn't say I'd kill him.
(21:21):
I've long advocated for road to his rights, all right,
So now we're the abdomen um. They do have a heart.
It is a tool instructure and does move blood along,
but it does not carry um oxygen around, so A,
the blood is not red, and B they move oxygen
(21:43):
and blood around in other ways through basically empty spaces
called hemo hemo coles. Yeah, it's pretty much the absence
of a fact there. Yeah, well it's in the air
to carries blood around to the organs. But yeah, she says,
the blood just travels through these spaces. And then rather
than having to worry about like a spare tire or
something like that, I like a fat belly. Right, they
(22:06):
have a actual fat body and it's just this little
area where they store all the fat in their body.
Very smart. I have that same place. It's between my
chin and my waist. Yeah. I guess they do have
to worry about a spare tire, but it's a very
specific one. Yeah, that's true, you know. Okay, so let's
(22:27):
talk about digestion um. The the digestive system is in
the abdomen, and it's really not super unlike it's just
like a simplified version of our own or any mammals
digestive system. But like you said, they can eat things
like in digestings like wood and cellulose, so they do
need some help from specialized parts, one of which is
(22:48):
called a crop. Right, that's um it basically holds the
food while apart behind it um a toothy section in
the digestive. So that is gross. And it's equal to
like a an octopus having a beak, crushing beak. They're squishy,
(23:08):
they're not supposed to have a hard beak in the middle.
It's crazy. Yeah, it's called a probe and triculus on
the roach, and that just pulverizes the stuff like wood
or whatever it's tough to digest, and then and then
it pushes it back. This this pulverized part to the
gastric cassilla, which houses enzymes, microbes, things that break it
down even further. And all this is just the preliminary stuff.
(23:30):
This is like what we do in our mouth. Um.
All this is going through this process in a roach
before it even gets to the part where it starts
to digest. This this is sort of gross, like the digestion.
When I was we haven't said the word bolus yet, Well,
we just did. Uh. And then the searcy that we
talked about earlier. These are the uh. It sort of
(23:55):
looks like short little antenna sticking out from the butt
area on each side. And this is what allows the
roach to not get like whenever you go to get
that flip flop and you rare back and go to
hit the roach and as you're coming in, it just
like darts out of the way. You're like, how did
it know? How did it know? It's because the searcy
they pick up on air flow and they can actually
(24:17):
feel and since that shoe coming. So if you're if
you're unto killing roaches like me, you have to be
swift and and stealthy and come at it hard and
with vigor and with a I guess a paddle that
has holes in it? Hey maybe so drag you might
be honest something there. Oh no, you invented sharknado. So
(24:40):
the roach paddle? Um so, I guess. So that's a roach.
That's the roach's body. Let's talk about reproduction, because they
do reproduce depending on the species. Um. I believe the
German roach uh can produce something in the order of
(25:03):
like eighty thousand offspring? Is that correct? No? Way more
than that. The German produces three the German cockroach and
it's offspring will eventually produce about three hundred thousand per year.
So a mother and her her kids. Yeah, like that,
the family tree from that one cockroach will eventually number
(25:24):
three hundred thousand in a year. Right, But think about this,
Then one of those kids and then her offspring will
be another three hundred thousand. Now I think that counts.
I think that's the whole Okay, Well, then one of
those three hundred thousand, we'll have more kids and another
(25:44):
three hundred thousands. It goes exponentially kicks in somewhere. Exponentiality
kicks in at some point. Yeah, an American cockroaches only
produce about eight hundred babies a year. So I got
something from Believe it or Not. The orcan website has
a out of really good scientific information. Uh. Did you
go and look at it? Uh? And they talked about
(26:05):
female courtship. Um. They begin courtship, it says, by raising
their wings and exposing their internal membranes and expanding their
genital chamber. Hey, boys, out internal membrane exactly. My genital
chamber is wide open and ready. I'm gonna release a pheromone.
(26:25):
Hey man, this is science, this is science. They released
the pheromones to attract males, and um, that's the calling position.
And then the males that pick up on these pheromones
approached the female, they flap their wings a little bit
to say, hey, I like what you got cooking there,
and then mating commences. It says when a male cockroach
(26:47):
backs into a female cockroach and deposits sperm so little,
a little like you know, it's from the rear to
the rear. You know what I'm saying. Let's go back
to reproduction. Yeah, we used to be really good at
stuff like this. And by the way, wasps, well, actually
(27:07):
there's just a side note. Wasps will actually sting cockroaches
and lay eggs inside of a cockroach like baby Wasps
can be borne out of a cockroach body. Right, They
incubate in the roach and I guess probably eat it
alive from the inside out. There's a movie. I'm just
gonna start saying that about everything. So there's a couple
(27:28):
of ways that a mother roach, once her eggs are fertilized,
can produce offspring um, and a couple of them involves
something with one of the worst words ever in my opinion,
the oothica oh th h e c A. Yeah, the otha.
You've never been to Outhca. It's nice. I prefer Oothica
(27:49):
upstate Uka. So that's basically just like an egg sack
that the eggs develop in. And it can either be
inside the mom, which makes her Oh vo viviparis ovovivi Paris, seriously,
that's the word porous Paris, or it can be on
the outside of her, which makes her over Paris. And
(28:12):
if it's over Paris, then she can just kind of
like abandon the sack, cover it up with some newspaper
or something like that. Sometimes they good luck or some
of them. It depends on the species, carry that around
with them and then actually care for the young after
they're born like the good mom should. And then there's viviparis,
which is basically like eggs developing in fluid like in
(28:36):
a human in the interest and in ovo vivi Paris
and ovivi Paris. I'm sorry viviparis. Yeah you confused yet,
imagine following along with just your ear and I'm looking
at words. So it helps, um the eggs are born
or the young come out live. Yeah, they actually give
birth to little baby cockroaches. So, like we said, the
(29:00):
German cockroach can produce three hundred thousand offspring. The German
cockroach and her offspring can produce three hundred thousand cockroaches
in a year. Um. And then the Americans and we
talked about nymphs. Apparently the nymph when it's born is
(29:21):
fleck of dust size maybe very very small. Um. And
there's a bunch of them, don't forget so. And they're white,
they're waiting to molt. They're very um easy to kill. Yes,
And if you're a common centipede, you love to eat
these things. Imagine seeing that on a microscopic level, a
(29:43):
centipede eating baby cockroaches. There's a movie for you. Um. Also,
here's another good roach fact is some mothers that care
for their offspring after birth. Some of them just you know,
either dump the ka or they just have the babies
and leave, but some actually raise their little babies, and
(30:04):
scientists believe that they the offspring actually recognized the mother. Yeah.
I don't understand why that's so hard to believe. Well,
because it's an insect. Man, it just seems like a
very mammalion there, not even ammalion, just like it doesn't
seem like something from the insect world like, gives them
a heart that I previously didn't believe. I know, I know.
(30:25):
Up with cockroaches, I don't know. It just puts a
face on them that I never really considered as I
smashed them, because you can't see their face. That's right,
um and cockroaches. If you want to make them a
little more um humanlike, a little more personable, give that
the little hat in a cane. There's social Oh yeah,
(30:47):
they're they're not They're they're related to termites, it turns out.
And actually, I've read a fascinating fact. I read one
of the best magazine articles I've ever read in my life,
and I've read a lot of magazine articles in the
most recent issue I believe it was of Harper's and
it's about ten Ways to Satisfy your Man. No, it's early.
It's an article about the early mycologists who discovered westerners,
(31:10):
I should say, who discovered and making air quotes like
magic mushrooms, and in between that time and the time
they became outlawed, and then what happened after they became outlawed,
and how they are all these outlaw like fungal experts
who all had like PhDs and doctorates. But we're also like,
might as well have just been bikers growing these huge
(31:32):
crops of mushrooms. Um, and there's a murder involved in
all that. But there's this it's an awesome article, check
it out. But um, there's this one fact in there
that there's a type of fungus that has evolved to
mimic termite eggs so perfectly that it can fool a
termite into thinking it's her own eggs. And termites um
(31:53):
salivate on their eggs, they keep them moist constantly. Um,
and this fungus needs to be kept moist, so it'll
be moist by a termite that thinks this fungus is
one of her eggs. Does that fungus then later on
kill the termite? Probably? Okay, because that would be I
believe that's irony, even though we've been told we misused
that word. Thanks for the ride, lady. Um, Wow, we
(32:16):
should do one of termites. Okay. Well, I say that
because apparently road eggs need to be kept moist as well.
Yes they do. I don't know. Do they regurgitate on
them to do so? They them? Well, another way they're
related to termites are they like to hang out together.
They like to live in groups where they differ as
termites actually have sort of like bees, to have very
(32:37):
specific roles in their colonies and a social structure that's
very organized. Cockroaches ain't like that. They ain't like that,
but they still like to hang out with one another.
And um, they actually make decisions like collectively together on
where they want to roost, you know, which is an
emergent system, right, I think so is that what that's called. Yeah,
(33:00):
they've done studies where they found, um, like big large
numbers of cockroaches, if they don't have enough space, actually
divide up evenly. Yeah, into like the smallest number of
spaces they can go, like, well, there's two hundred of us,
so let's divide up into three groups and go to
three different places and you go, you guys go there,
we'll go there, and we'll go here, right, and there's
(33:20):
always one dude cockroach out. It's like, what about me?
It would be a Pixar movie. Yeah, that's a good one. Um.
They're they're also social and that they follow one another,
although not necessarily a leader, but I guess whoever they
think has the best idea. That's the collective conscious. Yes,
(33:41):
And there was a group of scientists that created something
called in spots and it is a robotic cockroach and
they codd it with cockroach pheromones and introduced it to
a colony of roaches that accepted it. And then they
started to mess with the roaches. Of course, they had
um in spot lead them out into daylight so that
(34:04):
they abandoned their nocturnality. Um, they would wander out in
the open following this thing. He got him to move
um and he brought them fire. Oh really, man, I
was like, this is getting good. That reminds me of
the I know I talked about Errol Morris at nausea.
(34:24):
But fast, cheap and out of control is uh. The
robot scientists makes robots that mimic cockroaches and other small bugs.
That's really neat. And he said, one potential application one
day is to have like to imagine like thousands of
these that clean things, like these robot bugs that you own.
Well you just like hit a button and like two
(34:44):
hundred of them dust your television and then go back
to their little place. It's pretty neat. It's like scrubbing bubbles. Yeah,
or like the X files when it when across the TV. Yeah,
that rots wasn't cleaning anything though, what's scrubbing bubbles? It's
like a type of cleaner, it is. Yeah, all right,
is that a plug? I don't think so. Okay, it
was just a free association, all right. So let's get
(35:07):
to let's say you're like me and not like Josh,
and you don't want roaches in your home. I don't
want roaches in my home. It's just when I see
a roach, I will, I will gingerly pick it up
with a paper towel and toss it outside. I don't
at all, it doesn't okay, No, no, I don't squeeze
it at all. I just very gently, like, al right,
(35:30):
what happens if that roach like gets free and crawls
up your arm? Up your Okay, but I hopefully I'm
doing it outside, all right. I just want to see
where it stops. I'm trying to get a feel out
your position fully. Um yeah, if if it's injured, if
I accidentally injure it, I'll go ahead and kill it. Okay.
(35:50):
Well that's really you're quite the humanitarian or insectarian insectaria.
So let's say you don't want roaches in your house,
which is pretty much everybody. They say, the first thing
to do is try and seal it off. Good luck
with that, because roaches can fit into cracks that are
as small as one six of an inch one point
five millimeters. And just show me a house that doesn't
(36:13):
have or at least maybe some new houses, you might
have some luck. But if you live in an old
house like me, there's there's always cracks. Like animals can
get through these cracks. So if you realize you've got
a bunch of cracks, seal them up as best you can. Yeah,
But if that's still not doing the trick. Um, they
say that you want to go with a bait trap, yeah,
(36:36):
rather than a spray, because you when you use a
bait trap, you become like a pioneer tracker. Um. You
can put the trap somewhere and if it's not attracting
roaches even though you know you have roaches, Um, then
you need to move your trap. And when you move
your trap and start of tracking roaches, then you can
tell where you're coming from. Then you can seal up
(36:57):
those cracks. That's right. You you come to know the
roaches using the traps with a spray. It's just like
you're just spraying blindly. Can we do one in fleas
or just ticks? Just ticks. We need to do fleas too,
because I have battle fleas. UM. They say, don't use like,
don't waste your money on those sound devices. They say,
this don't work. That emit like some like a sound
(37:19):
that only a roach can hear. Um. You want to
keep your house clean? Yeah, keep your house clean anyway, Tracy. Uh.
If you've ever seen The Simpsons where margin Homer lose
the kids and have to go take a parenting class,
that's that this paragraph reminds me of. How about you
loop up after every meal exactly, clean and seal all
(37:40):
of your food, or cover and seal it. Wipe down
counters and tables after eating, Sweeper mop your floor after cooking.
Eat only in your dining area. I guess if you
eat over your sink, run the water afterward to clean
out any crumbs that may have dropped out of your mouth. Um.
(38:01):
And as a last resort, you could use poisons, but
I would never recommend that putting poisons in your household. Um.
You can always call your friendly neighborhood exterminator and they'll
take care of it for you, sure you know, Or
you can call an in spot and he can lead
all the concerts is out like the pie piper. There
(38:23):
are a few natural things though, Yeah, some things have
been shown to work. Nepa talk tone. It's in two
forms of catting up. So if you have a cat,
you might just kill two birds with one stone um
a sineole sine ala um also known as eucalyptole, and
(38:44):
that is in bay leaf and then ossage orange oil.
And they don't know what in that is the magic potion,
but apparently that works. Yeah, so if you're into natural
you could try some of those things. Just put bay
leaves and catting up all over the place, see what happens,
and or toil and you'll never have a roach again.
Or you can just clean up your house. I don't
(39:05):
see many roaches. It's good. I mean, I'm surprised with
the amount of moisture and how all my house is
and how like the fact that I eat all over
my house and spill things everywhere, you know, garbage laying around.
It's like gum stick to your floor. Yeah, but I
don't see roaches much. When I do. I have my
friend in the foot flop, I'm sure you do, and
coming soon the roach paddle. Yeah, I see. I don't
(39:27):
feel as bad because, especially after I saw those reproductive figures,
I'm not putting a dent in the roach population. Yeah,
I can tell you the ones that you're killing. Care
I don't. I don't know. It's sorry to tell. With
their brains since smashed on the bottom of man. Well,
if you want to learn more about cockroaches, you can
(39:48):
type that word into the search bar how stuff works
dot com and it'll bring up this fine article. And
I said a search bar, which means it's time for
message break. Yeah, this is from an Englishman who went
(40:08):
up a hill and came down a mountain. That's not true.
Self experimenter though when I was a kid. Guy's about
eighteen actually, And notice that when you get water up
your nose, the effect is all consuming. Can't seem to
think about anything, feel anything, or do anything except think
about that water that you just sniffed up your footer.
(40:30):
He's English at a similar thought about what happens to you,
both psychologically and physically when you get soap in your
eye because that stinging sensation and the resulting fevered knuckling
of the optic cavity, for is, for a short time,
the only thing in the universe. So while it's slaying
in the bathtub with the reflected sunlight sparkling through the
(40:50):
red tint of my closed eyes, contemplating this phenomena, I
decided to run my own experiment. I want to know
which of these all powerful sensations would eclipse the other.
So I got a nice big chunk of soap on
one finger and simultaneously rubbed it vigorously into my eye
and ducked under the water, sniffing in deeply. The result was,
(41:13):
as you can imagine, quite horrific. I must have looked
like I was being fatally electrocuted. I thrashed and rubbed
and coughed and cried. My final conclusion, are you dying
to know what happened? Was that, unbelievably both experiences behaved
in some sort of quantum mechanical way where I was
all consumed by two separate, all consuming events at the
(41:34):
same time. So basically, it sucked really bad if you
shared this information with the world. However, no one else
will ever have to suffer this hitherto undocumented facet of reality,
right because that kind regards James Holmes, not the maniac version.
Did he say that? Unneth? He have the signature that
(41:55):
was parenthetical? Yeah, from Manchester, England. So James, I don't
know why you do such a thing, sir, but I
raise a pint to you, Okayny and thanks? Yeah? Um,
isn't there like a whole movement like M plus one
or any equals one? The an equals one movement. It's
like self experimentation and is the study population? And so
(42:17):
if any equals one, there's just one person yourself. Yeah.
I don't know about sniffing water and putting soap in
your eyes. But he was a kid. He was only eighteen, right, James, Right, yeah, James,
not the maniac version. Thanks James. If you, uh anyone
else out there have a cool self experiment that you've done,
we want to hear about that all the time. Concorde
(42:40):
story too. Sure, let us know, I agreed. Um. You
can tweet to us at s Y s K podcast.
You can join us on Facebook dot com slash stuff
you Should Know, and you can join us at our
home on the web, our website Stuff you should Know
dot com or more on this and thousands of other topics,
(43:02):
visit how stuff Works dot com, m
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