Dr. Dominic Evangelista

So that's sort of like cockroaches superpower.

is hiding, escaping predators, or being in little nooks and crannies because that's where it's nice and moist and humid.

So this is probably something that they inherited from their ancestors.

So if we go way back to the Carboniferous era, there were a lot of insects on the planet that looked cockroach-like.

They were not modern cockroaches, but they still had that like flat body.

They had that shield, the awning that we mentioned before.

They had similar wings.

And then praying mantises and cockroaches derived from insects that looked like that.

And cockroaches retain that flat body.

I mean, it's mostly evading shoes or evading predators when they move that fast.

But yeah, they do move fast and most of them do.

My graduate students and I, when we're out in the field, that's what makes field work fun for us is that it's like a challenge.

With other insects, you catch them with traps or with nets.

By far, the best way to catch cockroaches is with your hands, with your just bare human paws.

And it takes a lot of accuracy, precision, and speed because these little tiny things, some of which are only a couple millimeters long, and they move very, very fast.

You just got to get used to it.

You just got to like train your body to recognize, oh, that's a cockroach.

Or sometimes it's like you grab it and you're like, oh, that was just a spot on a leaf.

That wasn't actually a bug.

Pretty big range in size.