Cockroaches, which have been around in some form or another for at least 320 million years, are building resistance to common insecticides according to a study published in the journal Scientific Reports.
Researchers from Purdue University studying German cockroaches, the most common variety, found that when hit with three off-the-shelf insecticides, cockroach colonies did not decline in size.
One colony got treated with all three insecticides, one at a time. Another colony was hit with a mixture of the insecticides. The third colony was hit with just one chemical that the roaches had low resistance to.
Regardless of which treatment was used, most of the cockroach colonies did not decline in size. Even when the researchers used multiple insecticides at once, a technique exterminators often employ, the population size did not drop. Not only that, but resistance levels actually increased in most cases, the researchers found. The results suggest cockroaches are quickly evolving resistance to the three chemicals tested. –CBS News
Cockroaches carry allegergens which can trigger asthma, and are one of the highest risk factors for the disease in low-income urban populations in which 85% of homes test positive for contamination. According to the report, “60-93% of inner-city children with asthma from different populations are sensitized to cockroaches.”
They’re also fu*king creepy.
There is Hope
Humanity’s last hope may be a gel insecticide called abamactin, which was able to wipe out at least a portion of a cockroach colony, if the cockroaches had low resistance to begin with.
“Overall, the unexpectedly poor performance of a majority of treatments in the field study suggested significant levels of starting resistance and/or selection for higher-level resistance in 4–6 months,” concluded the researchers.
To wrap up, enjoy some Cockroach tales via Gawker
A little tickle
Let me shut this comments section down. My ex lived in a roach nest. I refuse to call it a house. I had never seen roaches before I met him and I thought they were just big beetles. Well one night while having sex we got on the floor and he was pounding me out. I heard a clicking sound near my ear. Then I felt tickling on my nipples then I heard the dreaded “oh no” from my boyfriend. He immediately pulled out of me and turned on the lights. ROACHES EVERYWHERE!!!! Roaches in my hair! Roaches on my tits!!! Roaches in his hair! Then I looked at him and the face I saw I will never forget. He was looking at my freshly waxed vagina as if I had…..ROACHES ON MY VAGINA!!!! I jumped up ran out of the house butt naked ran around his yard and never returned. It took months of vaginal ultrasounds to calm my OCD.
“I started praying that it was just a hair tie…”
I had just moved to NY and was living with a friend in Crown Heights. I had seen cockroaches in the kitchen, but I’m not too scared of bugs so it didn’t really bother me, and the super said he was taking care of them anyways. No big deal.
Then one night, I came home and got in bed, and started to fall asleep. I reached my hands under my pillow (stomach sleeper) and wrapped my hand around something. I started praying that it was just a hair tie, but nope. Big ass cockroach, crushed in my hand. After that, I started shaking out my bed sheets every night before getting in.
That wasn’t enough to make me move out, since the rent was cheap and finding an apartment in manhattan was a pain. A few weeks later, I got home late one night and was sitting in the kitchen alone eating a snack, when I saw a cockroach crawl up my coffee pot. Being a curious person, and a little drunk, I got closer and watched it crawl around. Now here’s the bad part; the cockroach POOPED on my coffee pot! Just a little poop! That was it. That is the reason I moved out of Crown Heights. Not the lying super. Not the guy at the pizza place who pulled a gun on another guy and yelled “I’LL KILL YOU, UNCLE!” while I ordered a slice of pepperoni. It was the cockroach pooping on my coffee pot.
Four out of five dentists recommend…
Grew up in New Orleans as a kid. Must have been like six, was rinsing my mouth out with mouthwash from my bathroom cup. Felt different this time.
Spit out the mouthwash, voilà, a large roach. Nightmares for years.
And the other thing about the roaches in NOLA, they love to fly. Fucking disgusting.
What’s for breakfast?
As someone who once rented a room in a Section 8 apartment in Washington Heights soon after NYU, this video gives me both pangs of anguish and warm feelings of nostalgia.
Worst story: I once threw a pan on the stove to cook eggs, turned on the gas, drizzled some EVOO, ran to pee while it heated and came back to a sauteed cockroach.
“Like walking on potato chips”
Taking the dog for a walk after sundown in Houston in the summer sounded like walking on potato chips. They would come crawling out of the manhole covers and sewer grates.
Out of the sleeve…
I used to work in an old crappy hospital. Notorious for creepy crawlies of all times (think mice falling through the ceiling during a pipe leak). Anyhoo, one lunchtime I heard a lady nearby yell out “Lord a MERCY, LORD LORD LORD a MERCY!” Turns out a giant humongous fast moving freak of nature cockroach had fallen into her hair and sped down her neck, INSIDE HER CLOTHES, only to pop out from beneath her sleeve with a “howdy doo, glad to have ya!”
Did I mention it was her very first day?
…and up the pant leg.
I think our office building has finally gotten the roach problem under control, but a couple summers back we constantly saw them crawling on the furniture, scurrying across the bathroom floor, and, most often, dead and turned on their backs. It was a few a week for about a month straight. The worst, though, is that one of them crawled up my coworker’s pant leg – yeesh. I’m cringing just remembering it, and it didn’t even happen to me. This is a fancy corporate building in Midtown East, mind you.
“It looked like the wallpaper was alive”
That’s nuthin’. In Hawai’i, I let my 100 unit apartment manager talk me into helping his cleaning guy on weekends; steam cleaning carpets and carrying junk to the dumpster, mainly. $100 an apartment under the table for a few hours work. The third apartment we had, I walked in and turned the lights on in the kitchen. I literally heard the roaches running for cover; it looked like the wallpaper was alive. The whole apartment was degenerate-junkie, rotting-trash-never-carried-out filthy. I apologized to my coworker, walked down the management office and quit. I had lasted one weekend. And it also changed the way I thought about my neighbors forever.
“Dang, that is a fat bass line…”
(German) roach in my head phones, late at night, pretending to be a fat baseline that made my ear tickle. But only on my right. “Dang, that is a fat baseline,… hold on, this is weird, whaaaaa…fuckkkkk!!”
…
To make this a bit more real for you: These were the kind of phones. Little bug, about 5 mm or so. Really felt like a heavy bass tingle at first. Only too heavy, sorta like a stage monitor kinda heavy. That is why I ‘listened up’. And it kept tingling, also during silences….until it dawned on me. I took’em off, looked, and then screamed (in an empty, dark office space) and dropped the fucking things. Yeah, it made my skin crawl, too. Still does.
Like a chicken with its head cut off
One time, while visiting a friend in NYC, three of us had a contest for grossest cock roach story. Mine: hitting a roach with a shoe, having the back half explode in white goo and the front half run away into the closet. One friend’s: a group of people were eating around a table when a roach appeared at shoulder level. One person flicked it away, only to have it hit another of the group in the face. Third friend’s: she was turoring a kid who had one—I swear it’s true—crawl in his ear.
Naked, blind, and carrying a sink
Not my story (thank God), but my mother’s. She and my father lived on Majuro, a small atoll in Micronesia, for several years before I was born. One night, she and my father have houseguests staying over. Everyone has gone to bed, and my mother needs to get up to use the bathroom. If I recall this story correctly, she is naked and not wearing her contact lenses (because of course). Something catches her eye in the bathroom, a dark shape on the floor. It suddenly scurries quickly towards her, and she realizes it’s an enormous cockroach. She screams and pushes herself up onto the edge of the sink to get her feet off the floor… And the sink is torn completely off the wall. She then has to stand there in the bathroom, naked, blind, with a massive insect running around, holding up the sink so it doesn’t crash to the ground waking up everyone in the house.
The unkillable cockroach
One day i was walking home from work and saw a large roach. I mean this was not a typical large red or black NYC roach. It was bout 4” long and 1.5” wide. And the shell had ripples and iridescent colors. Well any who I skipped over it and went home.
Later that night I was on line and I heard under the table something so I quickly looked and holy mother of god. This thing was in my apt. Trying desperately to climb the wall but it could not get a grip. Must have jumped on me when I skipped over it and clinged on to my jeans.
The noise it made, it was as if I could feel its desperation. It made me anxious, I got scared, I just wanted the noise to stop.
So I grabbed a large knife, and I hit it, but the shell made a crunch sound, it was tougher than I imagined. I was shocked, so I chopped it again and again it didn’t kill it. It just got more desperate and it made more scared. So I grabbed a large exercise metal bar and wacked it.. It made that crunch sound again. It got more desperate, the noise got louder, it made his ng noises I yell at it to die, it wouldn’t.
I kept hitting it and hitting it until it stopped.
Until this day I don’t recall what happened after that. Did I kill it? Ist it around someplace? I don’t remember…
To this day I don’t know what happened to that Buick of a roach.
Maybe its roamng your neighborhood, your building, your apartment… Maybe your bed..
Shit I gotta go to bed.
Moving walkway
Summer in New York, which made me leave the city for good nearly 11 years ago. I was walking in Brooklyn Heights (Clark/Henry area) one early Tuesday morning (Monday nights were garbage nights, then) and the stench of the garbage juice on the sidewalk was strong. My friend and I noticed something odd about the sidewalk about 20 feet in front of us—it appeared to be moving. We moved closer to investigate. Mistake. Turns out it was thousands (millions?) of roaches covering a 5×15’ area where the garbage bags had been placed overnight near the corner. It was horrifying.
“You get the big delight in every bite”
I once saw a girl take a big bite out of a hostess cupcake and watched her fall backwards over her chair when she saw a big cockroach crawl out of the filling. Still makes me giggle thinking about it. Good Times…Good Times…
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/328zqu1 Tyler Durden