Dr. Dominic Evangelista

One of my favorite things about cockroaches is why the males are positioning the females on their abdomen.

Because the males offer a copulatory gift to the females.

So cute, right?

This copulatory gift.

What's so interesting about this copulatory gift is that it's made exclusively of urine.

So, oh, yeah, it's beautiful.

So actually, as far as I can tell, cockroaches are the only animals other than humans that give sexual golden showers.

It's really important to their biology.

There's these extravagant glands.

They've adapted these very ornate structures for amplifying this behavior, for attracting females using their urates and having females feed on their urates for longer.

It's actually a protein.

Oh.

So this is another superpower of cockroaches.

The reason why we expel urine is because that's ammonia.

That's like metabolic waste.

Our bodies cannot use that.

In fact, it's toxic to us.

But I mentioned earlier that cockroaches, one of their defining features is they have these endosymbiotic bacteria.

and these endosymbiotic bacteria give them this superpower where they can take urates which are normally a waste product and recycle them oh so they can recycle them and reuse them and create new amino acids from them so cockroaches don't actually pee they just

or they pee very little.