This is the last collection of photos I have, so the feature won’t be available until I get new pictures. Just sayin’. . . .
But today we have a photo-and-text essay from Athayde Tonhasca Júnior. His captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.
The unfairly despised
The renowned entomologist, evolutionary biologist, naturalist, conservationist and target of woke troopers Edward O. Wilson popularised the concept of biophilia (love of life), the intuitive affiliation humans have with nature that is expressed by our attraction to animals, plants, landscapes and other natural things. For Wilson, biophilia is an evolutionary trait ingrained in the human personality. While his hypothesis has been supported by anecdotal and quantitative evidence, not all forms of life are equally cherished. Snakes and spiders, for example, evoke fear and revulsion in many people, responses that are also embedded in our brains and shaped by ancestral fears of animals that could harm us.
Little Miss Muffet being scared by a spider, by William Wallace Denslow © Wikimedia Commons:
Among the many types of animal phobias (the irrational, exaggerated and uncontrollable aversion to certain creatures), entomophobia is one of the most common across countries and cultures. Many theories have been proposed to explain the negative emotions triggered by insects (Lockwood, 2013), but anthropologist Hugh Raffles was spot on in describing entomological scenarios that can trigger primordial horrors: “there is the nightmare of fecundity and the nightmare of the multitude; there is the nightmare of unguarded orifices and the nightmare of vulnerable places; there is the nightmare of swarming and the nightmare of crawling; there is the nightmare of awkward flight and the nightmare of clattering wings; there is the nightmare of entangled hair and the nightmare of the open mouth.” (Raffles, 2010).
The fear of being stung, bitten, or swarmed by flying living things help explain why, in a 2021 survey, Britons placed spiders and wasps at the top of the list of unpopular invertebrates. The survey also revealed an interesting aspect of human perceptions and attitudes: largely harmless animals are more disliked than mosquitoes, the world’s most lethal to humans.
Results of a YouGov 2021 survey © Statista:
Cockroaches came third on the British dislike scorecard, surely only because they are not that common in the country. In warmer places, where people are likely to have had close encounters with cockroaches, these insects shoot up to the top of the list, and by a considerable margin. A shiny, greasy appearance, probing antennae, erratic skittering and a sewage aroma are off-putting enough, but their flying and occasional accidental entanglement in one’s hair can send the toughest character shrieking away. On top of that, domestic cockroaches are associated with filth, which triggers an uncontrollable feeling of disgust. For psychologist Mark Schaller, this reaction reflects our Behavioural Immune System, a set of innate responses shaped by evolution to identify signs of contamination by pathogens and avoid disease. If something looks like it could make us sick, we flee from it.
A sight to make many people cringe: an Oriental cockroach (Blatta orientalis) sharing our table © H. Zell, Wikimedia Commons:
The upshot of all this bad PR is that many people loathe cockroaches. Fervently. And yet, there’s more to cockroaches than abjectness and pestilence.
There are some 4,500 described species of cockroaches, of which 25 are synanthropes (organisms adapted to live near humans) and considered pests. The remainder are found in a variety of natural ecosystems, predominantly in tropical and sub-tropical regions. They live among leaf litter, rotting wood, underneath tree bark and among vegetation, feeding on almost anything of nutritional value. Together with termites, which belong to the same order Blattodea, cockroaches are highly beneficial by accelerating the breakdown of organic matter and the release of nutrients into the environment.
Florida woods cockroaches (Eurycotis floridana) munching away on rotten wood © Happy1892, Wikimedia Commons:
And another ecological role of cockroaches is slowly becoming better known: pollination.
Some plants and cockroaches share the same type of habitat: shaded, humid spots under the cover of thick vegetation. These places are not the best for recruiting the usual pollinators such as bees, hover flies and moths. But a cockroach may be the ticket for efficient transport of pollen from one plant to another. And that’s an opportunity not missed by Balanophora tobiracola, a parasitic flowering plant from Yakushima Island, Japan. Margattea satsumana cockroaches are seen scurrying all over B. tobiracola plants, suggesting they may do more than feed on pollen and nectar. Indeed, exclusion experiments – where plants accessible to visitors are compared to those with no access – revealed that cockroach visitation enhanced pollination, while the contribution of moths, flies and beetles was negligible (Suetsugu, 2025).
A M. satsumana cockroach visiting a B. tobiracola plant © Suetsugu & Yamashita, 2022:
Cockroach pollination on a Japanese island is not an isolated case. In French Guiana, the cockroach Amazonina platystylata is the main pollinator of Clusia aff. sellowiana (a potentially new species related to Clusia sellowiana). The cockroaches have no specialised pollen-collecting structures, but their bodies are coarse enough to retain pollen grains and transport them from flower to flower (Vlasáková et al., 2008).
An A. platystylata cockroach and a Clusia flower © Cockroach Species File and Scott Zona (Wikimedia Commons), respectively:
Cockroaches are known to pollinate some ten other plant species, so they are not exactly major players in plant reproduction. But part of the reason for these meagre figures is lack of information. Shy, nocturnal insects living deep down in thick forests are not observed very often, much less researched. Cockroach pollination also illustrates plants’ capability to adjust and make the best of challenging settings; when run-of-the-mill pollinators are not around, a busy, inquisitive cockroach would do just fine.
Not all cockroaches are unappealing to us, like the Mardi Gras cockroach, aka Mitchell’s diurnal cockroach (Polyzosteria mitchelli), from Australia © Evelyn Virens, iNaturalist:
Thank you, Athayde, a very interesting and informative entry … as always. Terrific observation about mosquitos!
Mardi Gras Cockroach … now THAT is something I will never forget!
Great piece…
I muse that this could extend to aquatic/underwater life … creepy-crawlies of the deep…
Maybe not though…. I mean … if you go into water you pretty much have microscopic creepies ALL OVER yourself…
Thank you for this.
One very interesting (to me) tidbit about synanthropic cockroaches is that, at Einstein (while I was there) one of my Allergy/Immunology professors published a paper in the New England Journal about how a cockroach species in the south Bronx sheds a kind of dander (not the proper term) that tended to trigger attacks in people with asthma, and contributed at least partly to the very high asthma rates (and the seriousness of the cases) in the south Bronx.
Although I am somewhat creeped out by cockroaches that live in buildings as pests, I do enjoy keeping a few Madagascar hissing cockroaches (Gromphadorhina portentosa) in a tank as pets. They are big, but funnily enough, I think their large size makes them less creepy. They also don’t skitter around (and they can’t fly)—if you pick one up they just sit there placidly looking around, or amble along at a leisurely pace.
Your work is always enjoyable here – but this one is the best. Way to hit it out of the park A.T. Jr.
The key to bug avoidance is live in a new building is a start, but ALTITUDE. Living on any floor higher than 10 or so lessens the creepy crawly factor.
D.A.
NYC
Always a special treat!
I have a biologist colleague who will happily handle any snake while chattering on about its sex, other biology, and ‘oh look, it musked me! Doesn’t that smell bad?? Ha ha, this is fun!!’ But a small spider? Nope. Negatory. Having none of that!
And I am here correctly reminded that Termites are descended from Cockroaches. Time was they were in separate orders, but not any more. Damn those molecular phylogenists!!
I love cockroaches! Not really. When I was in graduate school living in a third floor apartment above a laundromat, and I disturbed the darkness by turning on a light, cockroaches that were out in the open would scurry. In the kitchen they would dive under the stove. Very appetizing.
That said, I found the Madagascar Hissing Cockroaches that we had in our arthropod labs very interesting indeed. I am told that they make good pets. See Robie’s comment above.
As part of a job decades ago, I had to take care of the University of Texas’ colonies of giant cockroaches.If I recall correctly they were used for dissection since they were so huge. We raised them in plastic boxes filled with dog food. The cockroaches, their droppings, and the dog food seethed as one. It was memorably horrible.
There is no better way to reinforce one’s innate loathing of roaches than to enter a bat filled cave in Borneo while wearing shorts. Huge piles of guano lay about everywhere, and the ammoniacal stench is unbearable. An unceasing gentle rain of feces, urine, and fig pulp vomit slowly covers your head. As you progress across the vast chamber you sink knee deep into wriggling soup. The first four to six inches is truly a seething mass, a living layer of fresh guano and cockroaches, all of which try to run up your leg. Large fast moving black spiders and formidible centipedes grow fat on the roaches. Below that is a crunchy layer of carabid beetle larvae that consume the fallen bats. With luck your boots stop sinking there. If they don’t, below that it is guano all the way down. Guano often liquifies, in which case you sink to your crotch and the cockroaches all run up to your face. To trip and fall is to be quickly subsumed. When that happens you flail at your face smearing guano across your glasses until your headlamp is knocked off into the seething mass. There it is extinguished, and you are plunged into darkness. Now you are waist deep and fumbling blindly into your pack in search of another light, but your slimy shaking guano besmirched fingers won’t cooperate. At the entrance to the cave you can see your faithful Dayak guides beckoning urgently for you to come, but you can’t. As you slowly suffocate, the gentle nibbling of the roaches is almost pleasant. The sound it makes is nearly indistinguishable from the pitter patter of their little feet as they swarm all over you like a living blanket.
My god. What you described is literally nightmare fuel. Please tell me it’s not a true experience.
Yes, that is a true story. I have been in many other similar places around the world. Anywhere in the tropics or subtropics with a bat cave there are countless cockroaches, and things that feed upon them. The smell is the worst part!
I need a chaise longue and some smelling salts, STAT.
Ah, the romance of biological field work.
Hugh Raffles does not mention the root of my own entomophobia: the nightmare of stepping, barefoot, on something filled with icky ooze.
(Apologies for my use of technical language there.) And the crunch. Horrors.
OTOH I love spiders (and snakes, too.)
Very interesting, as always!
While I agree that spiders are entirely unacceptable in any context, what revolts me about German cockroaches is the fact that they are attracted to and carriers of domestic filth.
On the other hand, when I learned that giant cockroaches (aka palmetto bugs) only enter homes by accident and are as anxious to leave as I am for them to go, I started to feel almost warmly toward them.
You wouldn’t feel so warm and fuzzy about Eurycotis floridana if you lived with them as I do here in Florida. They are slower than huge American cockroaches, but three times heavier. The smell they emit reminds me of liquorish, as a result I cannot come near any candy with that flavor. They are so big and heavy that you can hear their individual footsteps as they crawl up the bedpost to clean your teeth once you have fallen asleep snoring with your mouth open. My house is also infested with monstrous Kukulcania spiders which I cultivate because they protect me from reduviid bugs, but not even a big momma Kukulcania can take on a full grown Eurycotis!
Denslow is best known for illustrating the 1900 book,
“The Wonderful Wizard of Oz”
(click to read book)
Once again, I’ve learned from your post. Thank you!