Dr. Dominic Evangelista

Those can have like cool and interesting pattern, color patterns on them.

Where were you?

Great question.

So for the most of them, we really don't know.

We have like no idea.

We can guess though, one that you saw munching on the apple was probably a pest roach.

And we think that they probably just have very general diets.

They'll just eat whatever's around.

There are some cockroaches that we think probably get a lot of nutrition from bat guano, like a lot of the cave dwelling species or the species that live in hollow trees.

There are some species that specialize entirely on wood, not just termites, but the relatives of termites, as well as other cockroaches feed on wood.

There are some that are largely getting a lot of nutrition from fungus.

They're feeding on fungus.

And actually, it might be that fungus is super important to a lot of their diets, since almost all cockroaches are detritivores, we think.

So fungus growing on dead stuff might be an important nutritional component to their diet.

There's also some species that we think are pollinators, are drinking nectar, feeding on like garbage at the base or inside of bird's nests.

Not like, you know, bird garbage, not human garbage.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, I was just talking to...

some of my colleagues today about this, that we have cockroaches in our building and this is probably no way to get rid of them.

Like we can keep the numbers down, but they're not going anywhere because they just have so many places to hide.