Stuff You Should Know - How Cockroaches Work

Episode Date: August 15, 2013

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. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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This is Operation Trade Bomb, an Apple original podcast hosted by Mark Smerling. Follow Operation Trade Bomb on Apple podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark in 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 with LaCouca Racha playing in the background. Go ahead. Well... Oh yeah, we can't. I don't know if we can or not. Well, we probably can't. No, there's no way we can.

Well, hold on. Let's hum it. We could probably do that, right? That's lame. People just imagine in your heads that you're sipping a margarita and some mariachi band is playing LaCouca Racha right now. Not to be confused with tequila. No.

Which is similar. No. I always get confused with two. Really? Well, not when I hear them, but if I think of LaCouca Racha, I often think of Pee Wee dancing on the bar, then I'm like, oh yeah, this is tequila. But you know what LaCouca Racha is about? I assumed cockroaches, but probably not.

No, a cockroach who's lost one of his legs and is having a hard time. Oh, really? Yeah. I just found that out today. I did not know that. Look at me. I haven't seen either until just a few hours ago, Chuck. I was once like you.

Naive to the way of LaCouca Racha. You're right. All right, so we talked about LaCouca Racha as you'd hoped. You feel good? Yeah. Have you ever seen the X-Files episode with the cockroaches? I don't know. Oh, it is perfect.

It's one of the top five, and it's not even like a part of the big, bigger picture of ones. It's like its own thing. It's got a name for those episodes. I can't remember what it's called, but when it's just about a shapeshifter and it has nothing to do with the overarching conspiracy. Yeah, it's one of those. It's just about cockroaches and a cockroach infestation that may or may not exist, but

at one point it's getting really like the cockroaches are everywhere and everybody's starting to go a little crazy and all that, and they digitized the cockroach crawling across your TV screen. Probably not part of the scene, and it looks like it was on your screen. So now it looks like there's a cockroach in your house. Oh, that's awesome. 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 with the time, was like, you never watched X-Files? I was like, no, and then it was on every night, so I just watched the crap out of it. Did you see the Charles Nelson Riley one, where he's like an ardor, it's Jose Chung's from Outer Space? I don't remember that. Where like Jesse the Body Venturer and Alex Trebek are in it. Really?

I didn't see Chuck. Oh, I must not have seen them all because I was catching them in reruns. You didn't see like some of the best ones. Go watch those two. I know you have access to them. All right. Okay. Done.

So we're talking cockroaches here, and apparently also Jesse the Body Venturer. Did you know, Chuck, that cockroaches are extremely clean insects? Well, we said the same thing about vultures. They are personally clean. Apparently they do track a lot of germs, spread disease. They apparently leave a trail of fecal material everywhere they go because it's like a bit of breadcrumbs for them to follow back. Yeah, they spread bacteria, of course.

Yeah. They have fecal material, there are proteins that set off up to 60% of allergy sufferers, allergies. Yeah, they'll eat garbage and waste. They'll crawl on poop that your dog laid down in the yard and eat it if your dog doesn't eat it first. And yet a cockroach itself is very clean because they're extremely intense groomers. Oh, really?

First of all, they keep their antenna clean because they have a fatty secretion or some sort of secretion that if they don't clean it off, will 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 almost anecdotal, it was so outside of the scientific method. But they took a swab from a guy's hands who hadn't 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 they put it in culture and the guy grew way more bacteria than the cockroach's culture did. I don't care. Which means that that man is dirtier than a cockroach. I don't care. They proved it. I would still smash the cockroach with my flip flop.

See I don't believe, 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 monks of this sect carry little brooms, hand brooms, to kind of brush everything off wherever they sit so they don't accidentally kill even the tiniest thing. 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 they skitter. No, no, no, not cockroaches. I am down with killing mosquitoes and ticks. No, you talked about 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, I defy you to find the time stamp. All right, somebody please help me. I will kill the crap out of a mosquito, a cockroach, and I will generally shoe a fly. No, I'll kill flies. 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 like me. But mosquitoes and cockroaches I will kill, and that's about it.

Everything else, right to life. Cockroaches, you must die. So cockroaches are, I guess they understand that Chuck wants them to die. Many people do. They're very disliked. Right. Yeah. Which has possibly accounted for them evolving to be really difficult to kill.

For one, they're nocturnal. So they're hiding away from us when we're up because we're diurnal, which is the opposite of nocturnal. They have sensors, little sensors in there. Yeah, we'll get to that. Oh, okay. That's a spoiler. They run really fast.

They do. They reproduce extremely quickly, and there's more than 4,000 species of cockroach. So you would think the whole world would be infested with cockroaches, but not true. It's actually mainly just one species, the German cockroach, that is accountable for most infestations in homes around the world. That's right. It's one of the four main species that you might see, the German, the American, aka Palmetto Bug, which are big and creepy.

There's one man in South America that's as big as your hand. Six inches long, one foot wing diameter, wingspan. The brown banded cockroach and the oriental cockroach are the four that you're likely to come across in your life, and the German cockroach and American are the ones you're going to see here in the United States, and they have been brought here by you. Because they're not obviously going to fly from continent to continent. They hitch rides on airplanes and boats and get in shipping containers. In your mouth.

Moving boxes and grocery bags, and they are ubiquitous, and like all insects or most insects, they do a service. Most of them are going to be out in the woods chewing stuff and pooping it out and being a part of the ecosystem, but it's the ones in the home that really freak people out. Right. Chuck, I think one of the more fascinating things, and by the way, it just turned out to be pretty fascinating, even more than I expected. I just thought there were a few things that were fascinating.

Were you creeped out like reading this, or do you just... No, no, no. So it's not like that. You just hate them. Yeah. I mean, 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 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. And they've had a long time to practice this kind of stuff. They've been around for about 320 million years. What, longer than dinosaurs? Way longer than dinosaurs. 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? Maybe. Sadly, it's like we don't know because that hasn't happened. Yeah.

Oh, not sadly. Thankfully, that hasn't happened. Sadly. But the answer is some people say maybe, some people say maybe not. What we definitely know is they probably could not survive the nuclear winter. Because they like warm, moist places, so a nuclear winter would not be good for cockroaches. Apparently they're less susceptible to radiation poisoning than humans are, but more than most insects.

So as far as insects goes, they might not be the best candidate. 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. Sure. You know. All right.

So they survived the dinosaurs' extinction event. They have been around for 320 million years. They are very hardy little insects. Let's talk a little bit about their bodies, their creepy little crunchy bodies. So most of them are between half an inch and two inches long. They're brown or black usually. And that length is minus their antenna. That's just their body size.

Sure. You don't count the antenna. And their heads point downward, like as Tracy Wilson, who wrote this article, points out. Almost as if they're built for ramming. Yeah. 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 they're vestigial wings. They can't fly with them. Males can fly. Not very well, though. Which makes them even more horrific when a palm metal bug, a big one, is flying at your face. Because he has no control. Right, exactly.

Yeah. Oh, man. It's sort of like the cicada. I don't think their wings were made for flying, but if they jump off of something high, they can help them a little bit to glide, perhaps, and not hit the ground as hard. Short distances, basically. And they're 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 molt a number of times, depending on the cockroach species over the course of a couple of weeks, or over the course of a couple of years, and their lifespans also are in step with that molting schedule. But a cockroach will molt several times over its life before it becomes an adult. Yes. And when they molt, it's the same thing as when they're born. They're going to look white.

And that's probably kind of creepy-looking. I've never seen a molted cockroach. It's like a skinless cockroach. It's like the lady in Hellraiser before she fully gets all of her skin. And they're pretty susceptible to injury and death, obviously, after they've molted. Before Bersacon, which is a hormone, makes their exoskeleton hard and dark once again. Then they have their little armor, which is no match for a flip flop. 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. 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 they're, Tracy loves saying mouth parts. She writes a lot of these articles. She will never just say mouth, because it's not a true mouth, apparently. It's a mouth part. 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 like that. Right. There is a central nervous system, but it's not in the head. There's some sort of ganglia 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, I think. So you can cut a roach's head off, and it will live for a week, 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 actually breathe. They don't breathe through the nose and mouth. They breathe through their sides. There's little holes in their side called spiracles, and trachea tubes deliver the oxygen to the organs and tissues through their sides, so there's cut off the head, and it just dies

of thirst, 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. Yeah. Once you've moved on to chipmunks, it's probably beyond the point of no return. You're a bad person. Jeffrey Dahmer tortured animals.

Oh, yeah. He would lay down, and he would come across a dead deer in the forest, and lay down with it and spoon with it. It's like Johnny Depp in Deadman. Did he do that? He did the exact same thing. Yeah. Well, maybe he was a serial killer.

I don't think he was. No. He was a killer, but not a serial killer. That just shows how messed up Dahmer was, though, man, to like, that was a connection to him was like holding this dead animal. You're ready to travel in 2023, and since 1981, Gate One Travel has been providing more of the world for less. Visit Gate One, handle the planning for you with affordable escorted tours and European

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So that's the head? Yeah. Let's talk about their eyes. Their eyes are compound eyes, 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 wrote a bunch of insect articles. Yeah. Didn't you ever get sick about talking about the head, the abdomen, the thorax? The mouth parts. The mouth parts, the legs. They're all the same for insects. What'd she say?

Oh, no, they're not. 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 Xanax. That's Tracy of stuff you miss in history class, by the way, plug, plug. So we talked about the antenna.

They are movable, and they are known as antennal flagella. And they're actually tiny, tiny little hair covered segments, and like it's thicker where it attaches at the head, and it gets thinner and thinner and thinner until it's just like a human hair almost at the end. Yeah. And these things sense... They smell sort of, right? Yeah.

They basically, I guess, sense pheromones. Yeah. There you have it. They sense pheromones. They pick up odors. I think they're pretty finely attuned to the environment. Yeah, but that's really how they're getting around. Yeah.

Right. And even though they have eyes, isn't the antenna really the secret? I believe so. Okay. Chuck, you want to talk about mouth parts? Yes. They are a lot different than mammals, as Tracy points out, but they do have parts that sort of are akin to how mammals' mouths work.

For instance, there's a labrum and labium, and they form the lips. Right. Mandibles, there's two of those, and they cut and grind things like your teeth might. Roach is very important because roaches eat literally anything, and sometimes that's like wood and other stuff that they shouldn't be able to eat, but they can. That's right. Go ahead. Thanks to the mandibles and some other things that we'll get to.

Right. That's why I stopped. And then there's a couple of maxilla, and they basically manipulate the food. They turn it around. They turn it around. Like a squirrel. Yeah. Squirrel's arms or hands.

Yeah. Or a dung beetle. Right. The thorax, which is one of the body parts, one of the three pieces of the body, 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 the meta.

Yeah. So the pro is closest to the head, mezzo, middle. Yeah. The pro are like the brakes, apparently. Right. And the, yeah, the pro, yeah, they just do stopping. Yeah. The middle ones can make the roach go forward or backward.

And then, so that's the mezzo-thoracic legs. Then the meta-thoracic legs, the ones in the rear, are the ones that propel the roach forward. Yeah. And here's another good roach fact. You take this one, man. It is awesome. They can move about 50 body lengths 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. As a human being, that would mean we would be running 200 miles an hour. Yeah. That's why they look so fast, is because they are. They are fast. Now, like to us, three miles an hour is not that much. That's a very slow walk.

That equals 200 miles an hour in 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 other legs are still moving, so that's just like my worst nightmare. Yeah. They're coming after you. Exactly.

Man. So the three pairs are all built the exact same. They all have the same parts, but they are different lengths. They function slightly differently. But they all move the same way. It just depends on what the roach wants to do. Like we said, the pro thoracic legs act as brakes. The mesothoracic can move it forward or back, and then the meta push it forward, and they

apparently move like pogo sticks. Yeah. Up and down and back and forth. And then back and forth too. And they work in conjunction to allow the roach to kind of walk over just about anything. So when the pro and meta thoracic legs on one side are moving, the mesothoracic leg, the middle one on the other side is moving. Yeah.

So that's how they move, which apparently- It's like a little ATV. It's like a four by four. Yeah. Yeah. Look at that. She also points out that there are the parts of the leg, you can sort of approximate as if it were a human.

Yeah. They have a trichanter that's like our knees, femur and tibia resemble our thigh 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. The most frightening thing ever. And on walls.

Sure. And when a roach is 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 fall. Oh, I'm upside down. Yeah. If three miles an hour equals 200 miles an hour to us, imagine what a 10 foot drop equals to a poor little roach. Well, not enough because it lands, flips itself over and then runs away again.

But it's humiliated. That's true. 27 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. Oh, I'm going to find it. Okay.

I'll bet I didn't say I kill them. I'm going to find it. I've long advocated for roach's rights. All right, so now we're at the abdomen. They do have a heart. It is a tube-like in structure and does move blood along, but it does not carry oxygen around. So, A, the blood is not red and B, they move oxygen and blood around in other ways through

basically empty spaces called hemocoles. Yeah. It's pretty much the absence of a fact there. Yeah. The aorta carries blood around to the organs, but yeah, she says the blood just travels through these spaces essentially. Right. And then rather than having to worry about like a spare tire or something like that.

Oh, like a fat belly. Right. Yeah. They have an actual fat body. Yeah. And it's just this little area where they store all the fat in their body. Yeah. 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 a very specific one. Yeah. That's true. You know. Okay.

So, let's talk about digestion. 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. Right. But like you said, they can eat things like, and digest things like wood and cellulose. So they do need some help from specialized parts. Yeah. One of which is called a crop.

Right. And it basically holds the food while a part behind it, a toothy section in the digestive tract. So gross. That is gross. And it's equal to like an octopus having a beak. Oh, yeah. A crushing beak.

Mew. They're squishy. They're not supposed to have a hard beak in the middle. It's crazy. Yeah. It's called a proven triculus on the roach and that just pulverizes the stuff like wood or whatever. It's tough to digest.

And then it pushes it back, this pulverized part to the gastric casia, which houses enzymes, microbes, things that break it down even further. And all this is just preliminary stuff. This is like what we do in our mouth. All this is going through this process in a roach before it even gets to the part where it starts to digest. Yeah. Man.

This is sort of gross, like the digestion one was. We haven't said the word bolus yet. No. We just did. And then the cersei that we talked about earlier, these are the, it sort of 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 rear back and go to hit the roach and as you're coming at it just like darts

out of the way. You're like, how did it know? How did it know? It's because the cersei, they pick up on airflow and they can actually feel and sense that shoe coming. So if you're into killing roaches like me, you have to be swift and stealthy and come at it hard and with vigor. And with a, I guess a paddle that has holes in it, cut down air, drag, you might be honest

something there. Oh no. You invented Sharknado. So the roach paddle. 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. I believe the German roach can produce something in the order of like 80,000 offspring.

Is that correct? No. Way more than that. And produces three, the German cockroach and its offspring will eventually produce about 300,000 per year. So a mother and her, her kids, yeah, like the family tree from that one cockroach will eventually number 300,000 in a year. Right.

But think about this, then one of those kids and then her offspring will be another 300,000. Now I think that counts. I think that's the whole, okay. Well then one of those 300,000 will have more kids and another 300,000. It goes exponentially, kicks in somewhere, exponentiality kicks in at some point. Yeah. An American cockroach is only produce about 800 babies a year. So I got something from, believe it or not, the Orkan website has a lot of really good

scientific information. I saw that. Did you go look at it? And they talked about female courtship. To begin courtship, it says by raising their wings and exposing their internal membranes and expanding their genital chamber. Hey boys, check out my internal membrane. Exactly.

My genital chamber is wide open and ready. I'm going to release a pheromone. Hey man, this is science. This is science. They release the pheromones to attract males and that's the calling position. And then the males that pick up on these pheromones, approach 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 backs into a female cockroach

and deposits sperm. So 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 will actually, this is just a side note, wasps will actually sting cockroaches and lay eggs inside of a cockroach. Yeah. Like baby wasps can be born 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 going to start saying that about everything. So there's a couple of ways that a mother roach, once her eggs are fertilized, can produce offspring and a couple of them involve something with one of the worst words ever, in my opinion, the Uthica, O-O-T-H-E-C-A. Yeah, the Uthica.

You've never been to Uthica? It's nice. I prefer Uthica. Upstate, Uthica. So that's basically just like an egg sac that the eggs develop in and it can either be inside the mom, which makes her Ovoviparis, seriously, that's the word. Yeah, Ovoviparis, Paris. Or it can be on the outside of her, which makes her Ovoviparis and if it's Ovoviparis

then she can just kind of like abandon the sac, cover it up with some newspaper or something like that. Sometimes. And say, 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 a good mom should. And then there's viviparis, which is basically like eggs developing in fluid, like in a human. In the uterus.

And in Ovoviparis and Ovoviparis, I'm sorry, viviparis, are you confused yet? No. Imagine following along with just your ears at the bottom. I know, I'm looking at words so it helps. The eggs are born, or the young come out live. Yeah, they actually give birth to little baby cockroaches. So like we said, the German cockroach can produce 300,000 offspring. The German cockroach and her offspring can produce 300,000 cockroaches in a year.

And the Americans, 800. Yeah, it's not many. And we talked about nymphs. Actually the nymph when it's born is a fleck of dust size maybe, very, very small. And there's a bunch of them, don't forget. So they're white, they're waiting to molt, they're very... Easy to kill. Yes.

And if you're a common centipede, you love to eat these things. Even seeing that on a microscopic level, a centipede eating baby cockroaches. There's a movie for you. Also here's another good roach fact is some mothers that care for their offspring after birth, some of them just either dump the Uthika or they just have the babies and leave. But some actually raise their little babies and scientists believe that the offspring actually recognize the mother. I don't understand why that's so hard to believe.

Well, because it's an insect man, it just seems like a very mammalian, I don't know mammalian, just like it doesn't seem like something from the insect world. It like gives them a heart that I previously didn't believe, I know, I know, up with cockroaches. I don't know, it just puts a face on them that I never really considered as I smashed them. Right. Because you can't see their face. That's right.

And cockroaches, if you want to make them a little more human like, a little more personable. Okay. Get my little hat and a cane. They're social. Oh yeah. 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 an article about the early mycologists who discovered westerners, I should say, who discovered 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 there are all these outlaw like fungal experts who all had

like PhDs and doctorates, but were also like might as well have just been bikers growing these huge crops of mushrooms. And there's a murder involved and all that, but it's an awesome article, check it out. But 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 salivate on their eggs to keep them moist constantly. And this fungus needs to be kept moist. So it'll be kept 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. Wow. We should do one on termites.

Okay. Well, I say that because apparently roadtakes need to be kept moist as well. Yes, they do. I don't know. Do they regurgitate on them to do so? Uh-huh. Okay. They salivate on 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 is termites actually have sort of like bees. They have very 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 they actually make decisions like collectively together on where they want to roost. Right. You know?

Which is an emergent system, right? I think so. Is that what that's called? Yeah. Yeah, they've done studies where they found like big, large numbers of cockroaches. If they don't have enough space, they actually divide up evenly, yeah, into like the smallest number of spaces they can go. Like, well, there's 200 of us, so let's divide up into three groups and go to three different

places. Right. And you guys go there. We'll go there and we'll go here. Right. And there's always one dude. Bullies staying tight. Cockroach out.

It's like, what about me? Hey. That would be a Pixar movie. Yeah. There's another one. Mm-hmm. They're also social in that they follow one another, although not necessarily a leader, but I guess whoever they think has the best idea at the time.

The collective conscious. Yes. Yes. And there was a group of scientists that created something called Innsbot, and it is a robotic cockroach, and they coated 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 Innsbot lead them out into daylight, so they abandoned their nocturnality.

They would wander out in the open following this thing. He got them to move, and he brought them fire. Oh, really? Man, I was like, this is getting good. It reminds me of the, I know I talk about Errol Morris ad nauseam, but Fast Cheap and Out of Control is the robot scientist 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. You just like hit a button and like 200 of them will dust your television and then go back to their little place. That is pretty neat. Yeah. Or like the X files when it when it crossed the TV. Yeah.

That roach wasn't cleaning anything there. 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 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.

Oh, I'm sure that doesn't injure that at all. It doesn't. Okay. No, no, no. I don't squeeze it at all. I just very gently like, All right. What happens if that roach like gets free and crawls up your arm, up your shirt? Yeah.

Okay. But 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. If it's injured, if I accidentally injure it, I'll go ahead and kill it. Okay. Well, that's really, you're quite the humanitarian or insectarian.

I'm an insectarian. So let's say you, 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. Yeah. Good luck with that because roaches can fit into cracks that are as small as one sixteenth of an inch. Yeah. 1.5 millimeters.

And just show me a house that doesn't 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. Sure. 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, they say that you want to go with a bait trap rather

than a spray because you, when you use a bait trap, you become like a pioneer tracker. Sure. You can put the trap somewhere and if it's not attracting roaches, even though you know you have roaches, then you need to move your trap. And when you move your trap and start attracting roaches, then you can tell where they're coming from. Then you can seal up those cracks. That's right.

You, you come to know the roaches using the traps. With a spray, it's just like you're spraying blindly. Do we do want them fleas or just ticks? Just ticks. We need to do fleas too because I have battled fleas. Okay. They say don't use, like don't waste your money on those sound devices. They say those don't work.

Yeah. They'd emit like some like sound that only a roach can hear. Right. You want to keep your house clean? Yeah. Keep your house clean anyway. Tracy, if you've ever seen the Simpsons where Margin Homer lose the kids and have to go take a parenting class, that's what this paragraph reminds me of.

Yeah. Lop up after every meal. Exactly. Clean and seal all of your food or cover and seal it. Wipe down counters and tables after eating. Sweep or 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. Yeah. And as a last resort, you could use poisons, but I would never recommend that. Yeah. Putting poisons in your household. Yeah. You can always call your friendly neighborhood exterminator, and they'll take care of it for you.

Sure. You know? Or you can call in Innsbot and he can lead all the cockroaches out like the Pied Piper. There are a few natural things though. Yeah. Some things have been shown to work. Yeah. Nepa talic tone.

It's in two forms of catnip. So if you have a cat, you might just kill two birds with one stone here. A Cineole, also known as eucalyptal, and that is in bay leaf, and then Osage 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 catnip all over the place. Yeah.

See what happens. And orange oil. And you'll never have a roach again. Or you can just clean up your house. I don't see many roaches. It's good. I'm surprised with the amount of moisture in how old my house is and how like the fact that I eat all over my house and spill things everywhere, you know?

Garbage laying around. There's like gum stuck to your floor. Yeah, but I don't see roaches much. When I do, I have my friend the foot flop. I'm sure you do. And coming soon, the roach paddle. Yeah. See, I don't 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 hard to tell with their brains smashed on the bottom of my shoe. Gross, man. Well, if you want to learn more about cockroaches, you can type that word into the search bar at housetofworks.com and it'll bring up this fine article. And I said, search bar, which means it's time for message break.

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It's teladoc.com slash stuff for JD Power 2021 award information. Visit JD Power.com slash awards. This is from an Englishman who went up a hill and came down a mountain. It's not true. Self-experimenter though. When I was a kid, guys, about 18, actually, I noticed 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 hooter. He's English. I had 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 is for a short time the only thing in the universe. So while it's laying in the bathtub with the refracted sunlight sparkling through the red tint of my closed eyes, contemplating this phenomenon, 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, 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 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 same time.

So basically it sucked really bad. If you share this information with the world, however, no one else will ever have to suffer this hitherto undocumented facet of reality. Kind regards James Palms, not the maniac version, he says. Wow. Did he say that underneath? I'll bet he does have that in his signature. That 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. Okay. And thanks. Yeah. Isn't there like a whole movement, like N plus one or N equals one, the N equals one movement? What's that?

It's like self-experimentation. N is the study population. And so if N equals one, there's just one person you see yourself. Yeah. I don't know about sniffing water and putting soap in your eyes, but he was a kid. He was only 18. Right. James, right?

Yeah. James, not the maniac version. Thanks, James. If anyone else out there have a cool self-experiment that you've done, we want to hear about that all the time. Cockroach Story 2, sure. Let us know. Agreed.

You can tweet to us at SYSK Podcast. You can join us on facebook.com slash stuff you should know. And you can join us at our home on the web, our website, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com. You're ready to travel in 2023 and since 1981, Gate One Travel has been providing more of the world for less. Let Gate One handle the planning for you with affordable escorted tours and European River Cruises.

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