Cockroaches Know Things We Don't

bulgroz0 writes: "`They have been evolving for more than 300 million years. So they have got it right. They have been around a lot longer than we have,' said Davidowitz. Please see the Yahoo! News story."

Comments

Running Roaches

[speaker4thedead]

Turns out cockroaches are more complex than you might think. For instance, they run on two legs when they get fast enough and use their bodies for aerofoils. Probably the most bizzare experiment I ever heard about for roaches involved putting two roaches on opposite day/night schedules and then removing their exoskeloton on their backsand splicing them together (back to back) to study how the hormones interacted. I've also heard rumors of "remote control roaches," being engineered. Does anyone know about this?

Cockroach worship

[Curiosa]

So they have been evolving for more than 300 million years, right? So have we. We didn't just materialize as a new species, some years ago. And let's not take the Bible for reference... not this time.

WTF?

[James Lanfear]

That has to be true, but doesn't make any fscking sense. What do they expect us to do, add slashboxes for every section?[0] I mean, we're able to filter sections out but not in, so why did they decide to do it this way instead of running everything and allowing us to exclude what we don't want?

And I'm not about to try to figure out why I never saw this policy announced.

[0] As I just did. My there are a lot of stories I don't remember....

-jcl

Why does nobody see this article on the main page?

[franl]

After many days of existence, this article has only 4 comments (this is the 5th, unless someone beats me to it). Clearly, only a tiny fraction of /. readers can see this post, if any at all -- I only found it because I happened to scan the list of articles in the older stuff section.

If you click on older stuff , you'll see a scattering of articles with less than 10 or 20 comments going back as far as you can look! If you go back far enough, you'll see Cliff's article title Who is in Charge of IPv6 Packet Priority? , which has only 9 comments! There is no way an article with such a title could have resulted in only 9 comments here on Slashdot.

What's going on?

South American Cockroaches

[BigBlockMopar]

Ya know, I don't know what it is, but humans have such a revulsion to these things, and yet they're really rather neat.

There are three things in this world that will survive a nuclear war: McDonald's uniforms, Dodge Darts, and cockroaches. Which means the first post-apocalyptic morning commute is going to be really ugly.

Aside from destroying the electronics in countless microwave ovens, roaches are really not all that bad. I don't have them in my house, but I certainly prefer cockroaches to mosquitos, black flies, deer flies, horse flies, wasps and centipedes. Actually, the one creepy-crawly I have in my house is spiders. Lots of them. And they have a great time when I leave the windows open and the lights on at night.

Between them and my small collection of carnivorous plants on the windowsill, I do my part for the environment by keeping down the insect population.

<paranoid_wink>The insects are out to get us, you know.</paranoid_wink>

Around here, there's a great place if you're into revenge for any reason. A friend of mine was keeping some South American roaches as pets in a large terrarium. These things were in the 2" long range. Needless to say, I asked him where he got them.

Turns out there's a small company downtown that sells specialty insects for the film and television business. They've got these roaches, and they're just beautiful.

Not only are they massive, but they fly and they spit. Their size alone is enough to cause shrieks of disgust. That turns into fear when the cockroach lifts off the ground (sounds like a hummingbird). Generally, an individual confronted with such a roach is well involved in the second part of the basic fight-or-flight response before the roach gets a chance to spray the individual with foamy goo.

Just stick a broomhandle through someone's dryer vent to dislodge the hose, and on a nice, cool morning, ya put the roaches near the vent and SHOOM! They're gone, in there, ready to enforce vigilante justice and wreak havoc for you.

I can't imagine the sound of trying to crush a 2" long exoskeleton under your shoe. It's probably quite disturbing.

Re:DUH, here they are!!!

[re-geeked]

Try the "preferences" link among the pile of links on the top left, and scroll to where it lets you customize sections.