Dr. Dominic Evangelista

There's probably like three times as many as that in the world.

The vast majority of those are in tropical and subtropical latitudes.

So tropical rainforests mostly.

But there's also a lot of species in deserts and some species in temperate ecosystems as well.

There's also termites, which are subgroup of cockroaches.

Yeah, that's only within the last 20 years that it was somewhat official that termites are actually just fancy cockroaches.

So no, only termites are what we call eusocial.

Only termites live in those highly organized societies with different castes and a queen and a king.

Other cockroaches, they do have levels of sociality, but not to that highly advanced organized level that termites do.

So there are some cockroaches that we would call subsocial.

There are cockroaches that are more solitary.

And then there's everything in between.

So there's lots of species that provide different levels of parental care, including some of them that have small colonies where maybe burrows in wood or in soil that are guarded by matriarchs.

Yeah.

So there's lots of different levels of sociality among cockroaches.

Good question.

So first let's talk about what's not cockroaches.

So praying mantises are the sister group to cockroaches.

So they're the closest relatives to cockroaches.

So what makes cockroaches different from praying mantises?