Wily Cockroaches Find Another Survival Trick: Laying Off the Sweets

[Eugene]

Source: New York Times

Wily Cockroaches Find Another Survival Trick: Laying Off the Sweets

By JAMES GORMAN
Published: May 23, 2013

Everyone knows that cockroaches are the ultimate survivors, with enough evolutionary tricks up their carapaces to have thrived for 350 million years and to have completely adapted to the human species.

But the nature of the adaptation that researchers in North Carolina described on Thursday in the journal Science is impressive even for such an ancient, ineradicable lineage, experts say. Some populations of cockroaches evolved a simple, highly effective defense against sweet-tasting poison baits: They switched their internal chemistry around so that glucose, a form of sugar that is a sweet come-hither to countless forms of life, tastes bitter.

The way the roach’s senses changed, experts say, is an elegant example of quick evolutionary change in behavior, and offers the multibillion-dollar pest control industry valuable insights into enemy secrets, perhaps even revealing some clues for the fight against malaria-carrying mosquitoes, which are far more dangerous to human health than roaches.

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Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/24/science/a-bitter-sweet-shift-in-cockroach-defenses.html

[rug]

1. I despise roaches.

[kestrel91316]

2. My cats LOVE them. When I moved into the house in 2000 it came with a large

population of the BIG SoCal roaches ("water bugs&quot because the previous tenants never did yard work and just let the figs from the two giant fig trees lay on the ground and rot along with the leaves and stuff.

I used to find just their wing covers after a while. And then nothing. But on more than one occasion my younger cat, a male, would jump onto my bed at night with his new toy and chase it around. EEEEKKKK!!!!!

[rug]

3. I grew up in an old walkup in Manhattan.

The toilet had a wooden water tank on the wall with a pull chain. There were at least three species of roaches living in that apartment, with every one of their relatives. One day, after taking a crap, I pulled the toilet chain and thousands of these bastards came flushing into the toilet bowl.



I despise them.