Short Wave - Cockroaches are cool!

Episode Date: October 12, 2021

Cockroaches - do they get a bad rap? Producer Thomas Lu teams up with self-proclaimed lesbian cockroach defender Perry Beasley-Hall to convince producer/guest host Rebecca Ramirez that indeed they are under-rated. These critters could number up to 10,000 species, but only about 30 are pesky to humans and some are beautiful! And complicated! And maybe even clean. What insect do you think gets a bad rap? Write us at [e-mail]. You can follow Thomas on Twitter @ThomasUyLu and Rebecca @RebeccalRamirez.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, Duterinos. It's Rebecca Ramirez. And me, Thomas Liu, howdy, howdy. So, T. Lou, what you got for us today? Right, Rebecca, tell me, do you know what alien life form leaves a green spectral trail? Oh, wait, wait, don't tell me. It was on Final Jeopardy last night. Zad, we have a bug. Is that men in black? You just love a man in a suit.

You know me so well, Rebecca. but not the men in black specifically. I want to talk about a misunderstood, wildly underappreciated character. Okay. Let's thrive on carnage, Tiger. They consume, infest, destroy. Oh my God, Thomas, do you want to talk about the villain? You bet I do.

Imagine a giant cockroach with unlimited strength, a massive inferiority complex, and a real short temper. So, today on the show, it's another round of Faxon Island. So today on the show, it's another round of facts. smack. My Twitter bio maybe does mention that I'm a lesbian cockroach defender, where we give the stage to one researcher to tell us why their critter is simply the best. Cockroachers get an immensely bad rap. When we tend to think of roaches more generally, we'll imagine pest species that are unhygienic, invading our houses and eating all of our food. But these animals perform some really

amazing services for our ecosystems, and they have a whole amazing variety of things like by diversity, life history traits, evolutionary history even. We'll talk all things roach and why one researcher thinks we should give this often-hated, seldom-understood little creature some more love, which I disagree with. Plus, a quick detour about an insect many of us are familiar with, but may not know our highly specialized roaches. You're listening to Shortwave, the Daily Science podcast from NPR. Okay, Thomas Liu, I do not love cockroach. I'm only doing this episode because I love you. So let's just get right to it.

Cockroaches, what's the deal? That's the sweetest thing I've heard all day. So, Rebecca, let me add to that. Cockroaches are everywhere. We know that cockroaches occur on basically every continent in the world, except Antarctica as far as I know. And they also occur in almost every habitat you can think of, with the exception of a lot of aquatic habitats.

So you can find cockroaches in desert environments, in alpine habitats, or even in rainforests. So that's Perry Beasley Hall. Our lesbian cockroach defender. Yes, that, that's her. Perry is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Adelaide in South Australia. And she tells me that there are about 5,000 known species of cockroaches around the world. But that might actually go up to 10,000 when we consider ones that just don't have names yet and haven't been studied. Thomas, my skin is crawling.

Like, this is not a good cell of roaches. I have to be honest. You're just like, yeah, that bug you hate, there's thousands of them. Rebecca, what do you have against them? I mean, they're just minding their own business and going about their day, just like you and me. Yeah, but Thomas, they're gross and they're pests. What effort. Nope.

At least not, no, not all of them, okay? Perry tells me that of the 10,000 possible roaches, out there, only 30 are considered pests to humans, which is less than 1% of cockroaches. Fine. They can be up to two inches long. But they can also be very small, and that's part of the reason they're really good at living in houses, right? Because they can get into small spaces, small crevices, things like that.

So in the U.S., you know, we generally come into contact with a handful of those pest species, a common one being the American cockroach. Oh, yeah. I am unfortunately well acquainted with those. Those are the fast, brownish, overlooking ones, right? Oh, my God, you sound like your best friends. But yes, Rebecca, you just described the general shape of many of the world's known cockroaches, pests and non-pess alike. Here, Perry puts it this way. Cockroaches are dors eventually compressed. They're flat like a pancake. And that is the case for every cockroach species, pretty much, that you'll ever see. So I tend to avoid making general. generalizations about these guys, but that's certainly true. They also have their head directed downwards almost all the time, so it essentially means that the first segment of their body acts like a shield protecting their head. And many of them even have wings. But when they do

have wings, they have a really unique adaptation that their hind wings, that cover their four wings, are actually leathery and hard. So it means that when they lay them flat against their body, they'll act like a bit of a shield. And it's this flatish body and hard exoskeleton that allows cockroaches, like the American cockroach, to withstand 300 to 900 times their body weight. Some species might even roll up into a ball to protect themselves from predators. Stop. Are you telling me I might not be able to squish them? That's like my one power over the comments. Well, you know, you can definitely squish them if you use enough force.

Oh, I will. We squish roaches all the time. It's just amazing how much weight their bodies can withstand relative to their size, which, you know, actually makes them really interesting to study. Like, a couple years ago, researchers were looking into the American cockroach's body structure and their ability to compress to see if they can build robots that can be used in search and rescue missions. So while you're doing all this reframing for me, I have another hang up. Okay, what is this? I've just, I've heard the... they're actually pretty clean, which is reassuring, but I still think that they're pretty gross.

It's like a mental block that I have. So, yeah, this really does depend on the species and our own framing of them. The rest of cockroaches that aren't pests that are actually really helpful, beautiful, and beneficial. So cockroaches in the wild, the 99% of roaches, Perry says, really play an ecological role as, you know, recyclers. Take the Australian burrowing cockroach, for example. This particular group is responsible for actually recycling things like leaf litter, twigs, and seeds, and really reducing things like fuel load for bushfires that we might have. Well, I do love that. It sounds like they're little environmentalists.

Yeah, isn't that sweet? And they're basically, you know, helping fertilize the soil around them by releasing nutrients like nitrogen and making it available to the plants in their environment. And by the way, the Australian borrowing cockroach is one of the biggest. cockroaches currently known, coming in about, you know, three inches and up to 30 grams or about an ounce. It's like a little certified big boy right there in sick terms. Exactly, exactly. You know, Thomas, on the other hand, when we think about the pest cockroaches in our homes or in the city, you know, that like less than 1% you were talking about, it seems like they're not

likely recycling the environment in the same way, right? Right, sure, sure, yeah. So they've adapted to scavenging scraps that humans leave behind, going from one unsanitary location to another. So, you know, we start to associate them with garbage and uncleanliness. And here's where it gets a little bit complicated. Roaches can pick up pathogens from their environment. Their droppings can contain bacteria that can make people sick, and roaches can also trigger asthma and exacerbate allergies. But interestingly, though, Perry says they're also big groomers.

When you think of these guys in isolation, they're much cleaner than a lot of other animals would be. You know, I love dogs and cats as much as the next person. But I would say that insects are probably far more fastidious in their cleaning of themselves and their hygiene. That's a hot take, Perry. That's a hot take. No, don't get me wrong. I am like the biggest dog person ever. But, yeah. Now, Perry was defending roaches and insects hardcore with a, you know, sense of humor here. but, you know, she has a point.

Yeah, I mean, I will say, to be fair, it seems like cockroaches are complicated and contain multitudes just like us. We're kind of very similar. Like people, cockroaches can have very sophisticated social structures and practices. So it's been very well characterized in these soil burrowing species, but it certainly does occur in other groups of cockroaches. We know that there's a wood-feeding cockroach group called Cryptocerces. That group actually has what we call biparental care.

So both the mom and the dad will look after their babies for quite a long time when they're kind of teenagers almost. And then, of course, we do have the termites where everyone looks after the babies in more of a communal setup. So you can have single parents, you can have both parents looking after the young, and then you can have a whole community actually doing that job. I'm sorry, did Perry just say termites are on the list? Are termites roaches? Yeah, yeah. this surprised me too. For a long time, people, or I should say entomologists, knew that termites and cockroaches

were closely related, but it wasn't exactly known whether they were, for example, you know, cousins to each other, or if termites were actually a really specialized form of cockroaches. We now know that the latter is true. Cockroaches and termites share similar behavior in social structures. However, you know, termites seem to be taking it to the next level, creating somewhat of a hierarchy and caste system. Termites will only have wings if they belong to a certain social caste. Most of the other termites like workers or soldiers are wingless. So termite workers, for example, are very soft-bodied, they're quite small, whereas the ones that are actually defending the colony

might have huge armored heads to block entrances to their nests, or they might even shoot acid from the top of their heads, which is a really amazing adaptation that we wouldn't think of, you know, our cockroach to have. I mean, that's pretty neat, dude. It's definitely like scary acid-shooting insect meat, but pretty neat. It's pretty rad. Yeah, I mean, who knew there could be such diversity among our cockroach friends? Uh, Perry did. We know that there are cockroaches that mimic ladybugs, for instance, that are a brilliant red. There are cockroaches that look like they have little strips of kind of opal on their body because they're iridescent.

There are cockroaches that look like they've been painted like a canvas because they have intricate patterns all over their bodies. So they're certainly not all brown and bland like we tend to think of them as being. Wow. I mean, that sounds beautiful. I think I think I'm actually a convert, you know, pests and non-pests alike. So thank you, Thomas, for bringing the Roach Defender Energy to the show. Thank you, Rebecca. This episode was reported by you, Thomas Lou Jones, produced and fact-checked by Burley McCoy and edited by Giselle Grayson. The audio engineer for this episode was Josh Newell. And special thanks to Viet Le, our senior editor who did not work on this episode, but is in the spirit of every single episode we produce and therefore still integral to this episode.

And like we always say, Viet is behind so many of the smartest decisions. of this podcast. Absolutely. And so it is with much sadness, but also so much joy and pride that we have to say goodbye to Viet. He's staying close, though, just going over to the Indicator and PR's Daily Economics Podcast. And we know he's going to make them sore, just like he's always lifted us up and made us better.

So Viet, we love you, and we're so incredibly happy for you. On that note, I'm Rebecca Ramirez. I'm Thomas Liu. Thanks as always for listening to Shortwave, the Daily Science Podcast from NPR.