This magnificently alien looking creature, this gloriously wretched one we call a cockroach, stands out as one of the most fascinating animals in the Kingdom. They are a prominent member of the class Insecta which include the most abundant and diverse animals on Earth. With its swaying antennae and the shining, chitinous, amber-colored garb it looks straight out of a science fiction, causing a general feeling of revulsion. Add to that its reputation for inheriting the earth if humanity destroys itself in a nuclear war and the jealous resentment is complete. I have not yet met any who have not squished one dead as soon as they saw it scurrying around corners. And woe betide the one caught in the open…everyone enjoys stamping the devil out of this plucky little being.
Their maligned rep is due to the actions of a few of the species and fewer that 1% of known cockroaches has any association with humans. The top culprit is the American cockroach (Periplaneta americana), who happily resides in the shadows of human life. Like many cockroaches, P. americana is primarily herbivorous and feeds on decaying plant matter. But it can also be an opportunistic carnivore that feeds on dead animals and animal wastes. Well turns out that the giant cockroaches that infest the sewer systems all over the world and erupt from bathtub drains making you rise up in sheer panic uncaring about who is looking…can make a feast out of the pee that we humans put out of our bodies as waste. Is anyone surprised? Talk about cheap food!
Urine/Piss/Pee is made of uric acid which generally is the nitrogenous waste chucked out of the body and generally not useful to animals as food. Roaches are having none of those man-made rules. They team up with a bacterium and use them as sources for making proteins …..Yummmm!!! They must have enough nitrogen in their diets and simply store theirs away within their body by stockpiling nitrogen in uric acid, and then drawing upon these reserves when the source is lacking.
Helping the cockroach is an endosymbiont named Blattabacterium who lives within the insect in specialized cells. Any organism that lives within the body or cells of another organism is an endosymbiont. It not only provides nutrients (all essential and many non essential amino acids and vitamins) but also degrades uric acid so levels don't get too high and kill the cockroaches. Talk about long lasting friendships lasting 140 million years, based on trust and cooperation. So for eons the bacterium has allowed cockroaches to subsist on nitrogen-poor diets and to exploit nitrogenous wastes. This has allowed the cockroaches to be so widespread in their ecological range and global distribution. No wonder they survive anywhere and everywhere! Talk of help!
Some day, it might help us better understand how animals successfully store excess uric acid, a problem in human kidney disease and other diseases. It might also help us to make use of precious nitrogenous waste material in new and tasty ways. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) published the results of the work done by scientists Nancy Moran and Zakee Sabree of the University of Arizona, and Srinivas Kambhampati of Kansas State University, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF)'s division of environmental biology.
In India cockroaches are ubiquitous with not even the fanciest house getting away. They fly at you like projectiles eliciting intermittent human screams and a huge splat!!! Their guts spills out in a gooey mash of white and all of us budding zoologists have dissected them with glee. The purse shaped eggs are all over and you NEVER forget the taste of cockroach. A leg or an egg somewhere UGHHHHH! It is stored away in those famous memory cells which can be regurgitated whenever you meet the smell, flavor and taste again in life. 1973, on our way to the absolutely gorgeous Khasi hills of Shillong, the family was changing trains in Guwahati railway station when we first spied the cockroaches and crickets of the Eastern Himalayas. The size of a fist these creatures looked like menacing machines with compound eye watching you like a target. I have never been so terrified of insects as I was all the time I stayed there.
One has just to remember the lone survivor of the human world befriending Disney’s Wall-E to get a warm cozy feeling of kinship with the creature. Madonna once likened herself to the creature? See any resemblance??
The video sums it up nicely!
Reference:Cheryl Dybas,
http://www.nsf.gov/discoveries /disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=115886&WT.mc_id=USNSF_51
TIP:
Enter the amount, and click "Tip" to submit!
Kevin Army
L in the Southeast
dianaani
bbd
Nabina
ronnierayjenkins
Salon.com
Comments
Emphatic images, very convincing, and what MAWB said.
Rated.
Sincerely yours,
Gregor Samsa
Nonce of you saw the video I am guessing . It is hilarious!!
The uric acid thing is interesting. Mine is naturally high and the result has been bad gout attacks three or four times a year. I now take a medication that lowers it to below 6.0 which does not allow the acid crystals to form in the toe joints. It was 9.0 which guaranteed that I would have gout attacks. Thankfully by taking the med I have not had an attack in over a year. If the cockroach can tell us something about how to deal with gout that would be a big bonus.
One myth when I lived in NYC was that cockroaches only go to filthy apartments. The fact is that they were EVERYWHERE. In my building they would fumigate one floor and that would guarantee that the roaches would just go to the floors above and below. Nobody in NYC had any idea how to contain them and I saw them in the homes of millionaires and in pizza joints for the working person. They do not discriminate between classes. They know no bounds.
Monte
And I did notice the swimsuit girl on one set of three at the bottom.
Mostly, I noticed a story well done. rated
I can remember spending a weekend at my Grandfathers house. He only lived there in the warm months of the year and late fall through mid spring he was in southern climes. Anyway, shortly after reopening the house one spring I went downstairs in the middle of the night - only one bathroom . .. When I turned on the light it seemed as if the entire floor moved at one and then became a different color - from the center out it went from chocolate to white. All this happened in less than 3 or 4 seconds. The next day we went out and bough roach motels and set them about the house. By the following morning there were no vacancies in any of them. You cold hold the traps up to the light to look through them and see nothing but legs, wings and antennae. It took many traps and several days to get control of the issue.
Great piece. Keep up the good work. Perhaps you could go after fools on their cell phones driving next? . . .
Have a great week coming.
Warm regards,
Tetrazole
Sunil Adam
the things you think about!
keep writing
DLW