La Cucaracha or The Cockroach: both a hard no.

My years as an educator have taught me valuable lessons in so many subjects and areas: pedagogy, classroom management, differentiated learning styles. But there are additional gems I've discovered along the way that are truly priceless. Like the year I moved to a new classroom and went in a week early to organize.

Here was the lovely treat I found:

Yummy! Apparently cockroaches get stuck on duct tape (is there anything duct tape can’t do?). My guess is that one cockroach got stuck, pooped itself, and died… and since cockroaches are attracted to dead cockroaches and excrement, the rest of them were like, "Yes! Lunch! Oh shit, I'm stuck."

Cockroaches are fascinating creatures. They crave damp even temperatures (like my classroom) with great places to hide in the walls. It is estimated that a mere two cockroaches are enough to populate an average size home in one year. By populate, I don’t just mean Mom, Dad, and 2.5 cockroachita kids. I mean that Mom and Dad can procreate enough cockroaches to fill an average size home with piles of cockroaches one meter deep. Not even making this stuff up. Three feet of wading pleasure. Who’s ready to put on that bikini and take a dip?

Even if I removed all the male cockroaches from my school, I’d still see more and more cockroaches each year. One study at Japan’s Hokkaido University found that with zero males around, fifteen female virgin cockroaches still produced three hundred offspring.

They’re adaptable, and because of this, they’re great survivors. If a generation is killed by a toxin, the very next generation will be born with an immunity to it. Maybe that’s why there are more than four thousand species of cockroaches in the world. Not four thousand cockroaches. Four thousand SPECIES. Imagine every seat at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in D.C. being filled by a different TYPE of cockroach.

Luckily (luckily?) only seventy reside in the United States. That’s just 1.5% of all the little crawly cockroach varieties this world has to offer. Most live in Florida, home of navel oranges, old people, crocs in swimming pools, and apparently forty-one species of cockroaches. FORTY. ONE. Am I moving there for retirement? Nope, party of one, your table’s ready.

We have the little versions in America. Australia and South America hold the bragging rights for cockroach length: more than three inches and with a wingspan just shy of twelve inches. That’s bigger than my foot. I imagine squashing one of those under my sneaker is akin to slipping on a banana peel. The biggest guys aren’t the most dangerous ones, though. In fact, a lot of them aren’t dangerous. Some of them in other countries are kept as pets! Some help to break down organic matter.

Good news! Less than 1% of the entire cockroach population are villains.

Bad news! The US pretty much houses all of those villains: German cockroach, American cockroach, Oriental cockroach, and brown-banded cockroach.

So let’s go back to me stepping on one.

Even if I manage to decapitate it in my foot-stomping, it can live without its head. How does it breathe? It somehow breathes through its body, head be damned. For, like, a week. And then it dies because it’s like, “Hey, I’m thirsty. I need to drink water. Where’s my mouth? Aw, shee-it, it was on my head.”

For those seven days of its blissful torso life, I better be fast if I want to catch it. That headless runner can cover two and a half feet in a mere second. That’s the equivalent of me sprinting at 210 mph. Nbd, until you realize that’s how fast cockroaches can spread bacteria. And if I do catch it and try to drown that torso? I better have thirty minutes to spare because that’s how long it will take.

But I gotta hand it to them: they’re resilient little creatures. Not only because they can “take a lickin and keep on tickin.” Not only because they can stop mating but still have hundreds of babies. But also because (and this one's my favorite): all they need for food is each other. Yep, they're cannibals. And omnivores.

And apparently, crap-ivores. Is that a thing? Well, the cockroach just coined it. It eats its own excrement. Resourceful, yes. But how hungry would you have to be to slurp up the “kids” you just dropped off in the “swimming pool?” By the way, if you couldn’t guess by their poop-eating preferences, cockroaches are not picky eaters. They love bread, stale beer, wine, alcohol, fatty acids, and peanut butter…can you blame them? Sounds like my college diet.

Because they can survive drowning and decapitation, can outrun an Aston Marton at topspeed, and multiply like mad, they are the financial backbone of the pest control industry. Pest control companies bill the U.S. (for cockroaches, termites, bedbugs, and rodents together) $7.47 billion a year. Even if cockroaches only made up 1/8 of total billing of those four major pests (I don't know how much of the total billing cockroaches are responsible for -- I just picked a random conservative fraction), that’s still $925 MILLION annually.

Why do we want to exterminate them? Oh, I don't know. Maybe because they carry fungi, viruses, protozoa, and forty kinds of bacteria (gross stuff) pathogenic (that can cause disease) to vertebrates (that's us). And over half of people with asthma are allergic to them. So weird, but true. And they're middle-guy hosts to flatworms. Yippy.

And with their crazy diet and all the diseases they carry, they still scurry around like they go to the gym every day. As much as I cringe and have a quick body spasm every time I come across one, I equally salute the little vermin.

Here are the takeaways — the bright lights in the dark corners (where they’re probably hiding) — and the appreciation-worthy aspects of cockroaches:

They're resilient.

They're adaptable.

They provide jobs.

***Thanks for reading! Where did I get my info? A lot of it, I’ve just known and retained because they’re such gross creatures. But I did most of my fact-checking through terminix.com and pestworld.org. If you'd like to read more of my stories, you can find my vocal profile here You can also drop in to say hello on my personal website here. May you have a cockroach-free day.***