The ultimate survivor that outlasted the dinosaurs—and will eat your TV wires for dessert!
Rain forests, deserts, city sewers, kitchen cabinets–all are home to cockroaches. These insects are extremely adaptable and will eat nearly anything, from decaying garbage to oatmeal cookies to the insulation on wires inside of television sets! Because they sometimes travel from unsanitary hiding places to cooking and food-storage areas, cockroaches can spread disease as well as dirt.
What are roaches good for? Well, they sometimes eat dead animals and garbage. Imagine what our world would be like if nothing did that! And cockroaches are an important source of food for many other animals.
Many birds, reptiles, and insects depend on cockroaches for food. If cockroaches suddenly disappeared, these creatures might go hungry. It just goes to show you that every animal on earth, even a cockroach, is a valuable creature.
Cockroaches lived on earth long before the dinosaurs. Like many prehistoric animals, ancient cockroaches were much bigger than the ones you see today. Here are some other creepy-crawlers that have also survived since dinosaur times.
Although a cockroach looks something like a beetle, it's not. Beetles are the armored tanks of the insect world. They have hard wing cases, called elytrons, that protect their wings. There are about 300,000 species of beetles!
To be classified as an insect, a creature has to have six jointed legs and a hard exoskeleton. Cockroaches, which have been around for about 400 million years, were one of the first flying insects on earth. Are the rest of these creatures insects?
Cockroaches don't like bright light, and they don't like very cold temperatures. They feed on all kinds of things that we humans find disgusting, and they like lots of water. To a cockroach, a damp cave, preferably one full of bats, is an ideal place to live!
The long, whiskerlike "feelers" on the heads of many insects are called antennae. Unlike humans, cockroaches don't use antennae to receive television or radio channels. But they do use them to receive signals of one sort–tiny vibrations that tell them when another animal is near.
Born to eat — It's no wonder that cockroaches have been around for so long. Not only do they reproduce at an alarming rate, but they'll eat almost anything!
Source: Microsoft Dangerous Creatures (1994) CD-ROM. Text liberated from original screen art; images & clip restored from disc. Original media is Microsoft/supplier copyright — placeholder pending swap to open-licensed assets. Credits & Acknowledgements →