Fun Facts About Cockroaches

Pregnant for life? It doesn’t sound like much fun, but some female cockroaches mate once and are pregnant for the rest of their lives.

No food for a month–not even a crumb? Roaches can go without eating for a month but will only live a week without water.

Headless Horseman? Err… Horseroach? A cockroach can live a week without its head. It only dies because without a mouth, it can’t drink water.

Cockroaches have at least 18 knees.

Cockroaches are some of the most ancient insects. Fossil records show their relatives have been around, virtually unchanged in appearance, for over 350 million years.

Recent studies have confirmed that cockroaches are a major cause of allergies and asthma. In some inner city areas up to 45% of the children are allergic to roaches, and many of them have developed asthma as a result of constant exposure.

Cockroaches have been found to carry, on their bodies, the pathogens that cause tuberculosis, cholera, leprosy, dysentery, and typhoid, as well as over 40 other bacteria or viruses that can cause disease.

Doctors in some inner city areas report that one-half of the foreign objects they remove from children’s ears are cockroaches.

Cockroaches will feed on people!! They feed at night when people are sleeping, consuming protein materials such as eyebrows and fingernails.

Cockroaches are among the fastest land-moving insects. They are capable of moving 50 body lengths each second! If a human had this potential he could run a 100 yard dash in 1 second, reaching a speed of 200 miles per hour.

Cockroaches can detect changes in barometric pressure, and thus instinctively know when a severe rainstorm is imminent. In Bermuda, about an hour before a downpour, thousands of cockroaches have been observed running across the roads.

Cockroach populations can be huge:

1. in 1965 in Indiana over 6,000 cockroaches were found in a single beer carton

2. in 1947 a 4-room apartment in Texas was treated, and over 100,000 roaches killed

3. in 1967 a treatment killed 133 pounds of American Cockroaches that were living in the cage around a Chicago zoo’s prize gorilla

4. an estimated 1 million or more cockroaches were living in a house in New York, along with a family, 24 dogs, 20 cats, 2 mice, and a parrot. The house was so saturated with roaches that they had flowed out over the lawns, tree trunks, and walls of nearby homes, and into the sewers. This happened in 1979.

Sourced from: mypestprevention.com