This American Roach

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Wait, you're listening. OK. All right. OK. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab from WNYC. The SIGS. OK. So I have to tell you a story. All right. And I think I'm. I'm Luthvenasser. This is Radio Lab sitting with reporter Alex Nise. So my birthday is in August and a couple of summers ago here in New York, we were in the middle of this very hot, very sticky heat wave. OK. And I had like a nice day. Didn't do too much. I think I went to my community garden. I remember spending some time there. There's a park near where I live that I like to go to. And so I'd been outside all day and I came home and needed to take a shower. OK. And I was getting out of the shower in this like cloud of steam, drying off. Putting like moisturizer on my face. And I went to leave the bathroom barefoot. To go into my bedroom, which is right next door. To get dressed. OK. And I lifted my foot to take a step into the hallway. But right before it touched the floor, I felt these thready little legs on the bottom of my foot. And I looked down and there on its back was a gigantic roach. Oh. Wait, what? I thought you were going to say like a like a serial killer. You mean like a like a roach, like a cockroach? An American cockroach. Yeah. And this was like a big one. And it was on its back like it was dying. Yeah, but with roaches, you just never know. Like it could look dead, but be just alive enough that it's going to flip back over and run at my leg. And with my foot hovering over this bug, I'm flooded with revulsion, but also terror. Like this bug has got to go now. And so I got back in the shower, scrubbed my foot, wrapped myself in a towel, ran to go find my cat, put her next to the roach, take a few steps back. And I wait. And she's looking at the roach and looking at me and I'm like, do something. But she just walks away. So then I'm like, pull yourself together, like, buck up. I have to square up against the dying or dead roach. Right. OK. So I put on yellow rubber gloves and then I get a wad of paper towels saturated in water, grab toilet bowl cleaner, you know, like the blue gel. OK. Squirt a bunch of it into the paper towel and from like three feet away, toss it so that it lands gel down on top of the roach. And then I take a shoe and holding it like as far away from my body as I can get it. I'm just like like what? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? OK, yeah. What? Mm hmm. Yeah. And then I get a trash bag, scoop it up and stick it in there and then tie it up super tight. Wow. Then it goes into the trash chute. And standing there in rubber gloves next to the trash chute on my birthday, I'm just like, what is wrong with me? Like this is not the first time that this has happened. Every single time I see a roach, I completely unravel. Like I just go nuts and I don't even hate bugs in general. It's just something about this bug. I don't know. Like I just snap. And for some reason, when it happened this time, I was like, I'm a whole adult person. I'm a science reporter. This has to stop. OK, so is what is what we're doing here? Like it's like how Alex learned to stop worrying and love the roach. Not really. I'm not really trying to get cozy with roaches. I just want to figure out how to get to a place where I'm not terrified of them. And obviously, I know this is something that a lot of people are afraid of. And I wanted to figure out, you know, is there something I can do? So that the next time I see one, I don't completely lose my mind. So I figured I'd go hang out with people who face basically the worst version of this every single day, OK, which is how I ended up at the after party. The finest expose in New York, probably in the day for the New York City Pest Expo. We get top notch pest control companies and exterminators from all over. There was like a roach ball. Yeah, it's like the social part. There's food, there's drinks. There was a DJ like there's music and also. Oh, yeah, I've seen roaches drop off the ceiling. A ton of people who have been in straight up nightmare scenarios. I've knocked on doors and seen them running up and down the doors. Roaches were in everything from the record player to the TV to the bedhead. This place was literally, I'm telling Stephen King levels of roaches. And yet no fear. We had to take care of the situation. How many insects do you do you have at home? Oh, I have about four or five thousand bed bugs. Yeah, this is Lou Sorkin, an entomologist and pest control consultant. All the three cockroach species, millipede, centipede, spiders, whip scorpion. And right next to him, he had this huge plastic tub of cockroaches. This is a Madagascar hissing cockroach. Oh, yes, Madagascar ones are huge, right? Yeah, like some of the biggest roaches in the world. And at one point, Lou just picked one up with his bare hands. They won't bother you. I just know sitting there tasting. You could see the palps come from the mouth down and touch my skin. I think I might have my first night. We'll see. And I was like, how are these people like that? Hi. Nice to meet you. And could I get like that? Well, let's go. Take a stroll. So I found some exterminators who agreed to let me follow them around. One named LaKeisha Fulcher. Here we have 11 buildings or 16 stories. She works at a public housing complex on the Lower East Side. I go in your house, you have 300 roaches. I'm happy. Give me five days. Let's go. And also a guy named Cedric Simmons. He has his own company. So right now we're headed to North Bronx to a residential unit that has been having some issues with German roaches. And they just started showing me the ropes. The flashlight is the most essential piece of the toolkit. We went into basements and trash rooms. But in the light on, of course, the scatter, they're going to places like this. They showed me how to find signs that roaches were living there, even when they're hiding. So you'll be looking for marks like this. What looked like pen tapping? It looked like pepper, like stuck pepper on a wall. It's roach droppings. And of course, how to kill them. There's one right there. Oh, yeah. See it? Cedric takes me inside this house. And the first thing he does is take a look around the closet with his flashlight. And you can see the roaches perched up on the wall. Oh, there's two more up there. And then he goes to the kitchen sink and he pulls out this jug and it's this chemical. You know, it's basically industrial strength raid. Yeah, it is pretty strong. It has a pretty good knockdown to knockdown, meaning how quick it reduces the population. The kind of stuff you need a license to buy. Like you can't get this at Home Depot. So what does this actually do to them? So it attacks their nervous system and it disrupts it and it makes them basically just incapable and then it succumbs them. Is it painful for them? I don't know. I don't know. At some point, he pointed out a pregnant roach. That one back there has it's egg sac about to come out. The one on the wall? Yeah, the corner. Is that that little like the whole thing at the very end? Yeah, that's an egg sac. Oh, man. And then he started spraying them. And after about 10 minutes, they made their last twitches. All right, guys, definitely dead. How did you feel about that? Like, did you feel bad? Um, sort of. Wow. The sac is coming out. Damn. I was like, that sucks. For a second. Yeah. And then it's like, I didn't think about it for the rest of the day. Oh, well, sorry. Honestly, what I really felt were these little glimmers of confidence. Like you weren't afraid. Well, it's not that I wasn't afraid, but it was like my fear had shrunk just enough that I was starting to feel kind of bold. Like maybe I could kill these things too. So here we have roach activity, panoramic activity. And then also that's the grind. And the bait. Yeah. Okay. He saw one. I didn't freak out. Like Cedric took me to Grand Central Station. And let's, let's, let's go for it. I was seeing fat roaches and acting like it was no big deal. Oh, big one. Okay. I didn't like it. It's so tall, but it was nothing like before. Yeah. I can step on them. I can spray them. Um, I don't know. Stepping seems kind of old school. Maybe we do that. Wow. That was fun. Yeah. But then one night I was just sitting around my apartment. A friend was over. We were watching TV. Okay. And I went to the kitchen for a glass of water. He has been rebounding his head. And I saw something slightly moved in the sink. So I looked inside and I saw antenna. And I was like, nope. Walked straight out of the kitchen, got my friend told him he needs to come deal with it. And then I stood behind him and squealed while I watched him kill it. Wait, what happened to all your training? I don't know. I just couldn't do it. What? I mean, first of all, LaKeisha and Cedric know where to be found. Right. And second of all, I was seeing this roach in my house, in my sink, where I had just washed blueberries that morning. And I think it triggered some kind of survival instinct. And I just don't think any amount of pest control knowledge was going to override that. Yeah. Basically, I was just like, okay, well, that didn't work. Back to square one. You know, I got to start over. And one day I was just googling around and I stumbled across this guy. Hey, guys, I'm Chef Joseph Yoon, edible insect ambassador at Berkland Bugs. And we're going to show you how to eat all these bugs. Yeah, I've seen this YouTube video of him doing like different dishes with bugs. Yeah, like gourmet dishes. Yeah. Bug appetite. The beautiful notes of cricket, umami and nuttiness. This is perfect. Oh, wait, but you're not going to. Well, I just thought if anyone could help me get over that revulsion, I feel towards these bugs. This scorpion literally adds so much labor. Maybe it's this guy. Like if I could just eat a roach, maybe it wouldn't be nasty anymore. It would just be a little snack. All right. And so I sent him an email and I was like, do you ever cook with roaches? And he wrote back to me and was like, absolutely not. I'm already trying to do a lot of work to convince people that they should eat other bugs. Roaches have such a bad reputation. Like roaches don't help my cause, basically. I love that it's a bridge too far for him. So I went back and forth with him being like, you're the only person I can possibly think of who could make me like eating a roach. And then finally. You bullied him into doing it. He like, I fear I might have. I fear I might have. Smells good. Okay. So what happened? Let's do it. What's going on? Right. So me and eight of our colleagues, Joseph had like very, very generously invited us to his home in Queens. We're all going to try something really kind of unusual and weird. So obviously all of us are really nervous, including Joseph, because he's never actually eaten an American cockroach before. So we started with his usual dishes, crickets, ants, mealworms. This is the brood 19 cicadas. And it has a cricket tempera batter on it. Okay. So this is just a warmup. Yeah. All right. Delicious. I love it. And the whole time I'm looking over at the bowl of cockroaches on the counter out of the side of my eye. And by the way, they weren't like random roaches. These were food safe from a lab. Okay. Good to know. And honestly, let's say I was kind of in denial that any of this was about to happen. They're quite frightened. Maybe I'll pull the legs off of them. First up, dubia roaches. There might be anirids at squirt in your mouth. Fried. I can't really taste anything, which is ideal. Oh, something. It's mental. Something poked the inside of my mouth. It's a leg. You think it's a leg? I, let's, if I don't know what it was, but I hated it. Inside of the batter is doing really good. Next, Madagascar hissing cockroaches. And he had blanched these and done nothing else. You can dress a cockroach, but still a cockroach. He put them on a cutting board and sliced them so we could slurp the insides out like an oyster. It looks like cottage cheese, but this one was not that bad. It has like a really umami smell. Better. Much better. It was like eggs. Huh. And then finally, my arch nemesis. The American cockroach. Oh. So he grabs some kind of cooking oil, throws it in a pan and adds all these aromatics, like garlic, red pepper, and then he throws in the roaches. You know what, it has kind of a kind of a smell to it that the other two didn't have. It's kind of weird. But as he started to cook, everyone's faces, including Joseph's, just started to fall because no matter how long he was like sauteing these freaking roaches with all these aromatics. It just smelled off. Over, over, over. Let's just have the chocolate crickets. But Joseph still grabbed a spoon. I think someone has to do it. Took a bite. What does it taste like? And the look on his face made me feel really guilty. I mean, I almost spit out what I ate. Terrestrials producer Alan Gafinski also tried it. Nervous. I mean, it doesn't. Oh, yeah, there it is. Well, initially it just kind of just was tasting sort of the garlic, like an onion. But that's that smell that you guys have been smelling is. It's also a taste. It tastes like something that you shouldn't eat. Yeah. Yeah. What is the Roche smell smell like? Kind of like medicinal, but in like a foul sour kind of way. So you did not eat it? No, like according to a bugs as food expert, the American cockroach is literally inedible. It's a warning sign to me. It's like kind of like, don't eat me. I dare you to eat me. I'll kill you. Man, this is really not going well. Yeah. No, the whole thing completely backfired. Yeah. So we're going to take a quick break. Yeah. Cleans our palate. Yeah. But after the break, things are going to get even messier. We'll be right back. Radio Lab is sponsored by BetterHelp. What do you think when you hear the word summer? Do you think heat? Do you think beach? Do you think travel? Do you think sand? Do you think long nights, but still having to get up early? Do you think juggling summer camp schedules and attending weddings, perhaps without a date? Do you think malaise or overwhelm or s-s-s-s-s-s-summer time? Sadness. Look, just because it's nice out doesn't mean juggling at all suddenly got easier. If summer's making you sluggish, maybe therapy can help. And BetterHelp is one easy way to find a licensed therapist in the US. 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This is Radiolab back with reporter Alex Nisen, who has just faced her deep-seated fear of the roach in a number of unspeakable ways. Yes. But it backfired and she only managed to surface her maybe even more deep-seated disgust for them. Yeah, I didn't want them in my life, in my city, in my stage, anywhere, on planet Earth. I just hate them. And this boom likes to smile. Sort of amidst all of this. I came across this book called Pests, How Humans Create Animal Villains by Science Writer. Can I cuss on this program? Yes, Bethany Brookshire. So this squirrel is known as fucking Kevin. And this book, it was just on the front table at my neighborhood bookstore, but it turned out to be exactly what I needed. Because while the animal Bethany hates is a squirrel. And he lives in the maple tree in front of my house. Particularly the ones that she named Kevin, who were eating all of her tomatoes. She doesn't even eat it, just one bite and then leaves it. So this is like personal. Yes, I really did contemplate a BB gun. Wow. But Kevin is one of the creatures that led me to this deep question of... The question the book was asking. What is it that makes us hate animals? Yeah. I could sort of feel it elevating me out of my murder, murder, murder, kill, kill, kill lizard brain to this idea that I could really get behind. Every time an animal has succeeded really well at living near us, we hate them. If we can't take it in, tame it and put it in a little, little doggie sweater, we do not want it. That word pest takes an animal that is like a living, breathing creature that lives here on this planet with us and turns it into an object. We're saying that that animal has no value. We are saying that anything we need to do to get rid of that animal is worthwhile. Which is exactly how I feel about roaches. And she sort of proposes that we should do away with the category of pests altogether. Wait, that's fascinating. And, you know, the wheels in my head just like start spinning. And I just kept thinking, like, huh, this is how I want to be in the world. What I want my politic to be. Like I'm going to make a t-shirt says abolish pests and let people ask me about it. Like I'm down. And I really want to not hate the roach. Yes. But how? Well, so a lot of the way we respond to animals and the anger we feel and the frustration arises out of our own ignorance. Sounds like you need to, you know, walk a mile in their little weird disgusting feet. I know. I think it's time to learn about these revolting, repulsive, nauseating, offensive, terrible animals. OK, so let's chat a little bit about the discussed response. So I called up entomologist Sammy Ramsey, professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. OK, I needed you to see what is happening on this tree. Look at this. Because this guy. Somebody look at this. Really? How cute is this bug? Loves bugs. This bug. How cute is this bug? He even has a YouTube channel where he sometimes sings to bugs. OK, he likes bugs. I love it. And so I thought if anyone can help me abolish the pest in my heart, it would be Sammy. All right, Alex, listeners, y'all ready for Dr. Sammy's story time? Yes. It's Dr. Sammy's story time. All right, y'all, we're going to get some theme music for that at some point. But anyway. And maybe it's just because Sammy is really charming. But talking to him, I couldn't help but feel my hatred of the roach. They are the coolest. Begin to soften. Cockroaches are survivors. I learned that they're at least as old as the dinosaurs as a species. They can go for ridiculous amounts of time without food. You can cut off a cockroach's head and they can survive for more than a week. They can run like three miles an hour. They're basically the cheetah of the insect world. Cool. They are very resistant to nuclear radiation. They can eat paper, just paper. It's some of these survival techniques, like their tendency to run away from light and their ability to flatten their bodies and squeeze into even the tiniest crack or crevice that make people distrust them like we step on a cockroach. And then ever so slowly lift our foot. And it runs away. And we're just like, how? What sort of sorcery did you just do? So I was listening to all this stuff. Sammy was telling me. Do they have nine lives? It was almost like I could feel the roach begin to transform into something more than just a pest. So they've sort of evolved to protect themselves in this way from us, the predator and like other predators, I guess. Like these organisms are absolutely incredible and had they not. But then he told me that as much as I didn't want cockroaches around. Cockroaches, they don't want to be here. They didn't want to be around either. Huh. What does that mean? Well, apparently the name. Parapanida americana, the American cockroach is a misnomer. They used to live their best lives just running around on a totally different continent. But in order to really tell its story, I need to take you back hundreds of years when colonists showed up on the west coast of Africa. They corralled a bunch of human beings onto these ships. They stacked them like furniture and gave them no opportunities to behave like humans to go to the restroom. The cleanliness standards on those ships were pretty low. And there were also some hitchhikers on those ships. See, the American cockroach is actually from Africa. And they climbed aboard those ships that had a bunch of unprotected food in various places. And they found the slats of wood between the ships to be great spaces for them to wedge their bodies. And when they got to the US, they set up a whole new population. So they got here on slave ships. They didn't really have too much of a choice in the matter. They tells me this in this conversation and I it just like it felt like. Damn. OK. Why like why would you let's start this whole conversation over and just like can we just not? It was just sort of like like I can't even just hate a bug without the shadow of slavery. Like I just wanted to hate this bug and see if I can not hate it. And then it's like now this. Hmm. I mean, can you like what was inside of that moment for you? Well, I talked to a bunch of people about this. Are you asking me if I feel kinship to these roaches? No, absolutely not. I'm like and one of them was author and my friend, Angela Florenoi. Obviously, the metaphor is a bound because there's like this thing that I think everyone's going to do, which is be like, oh, great, shared history. You guys survived something together. And so, you know, you should feel some special connection to this insect. Right. That just sort of walks itself into the room. It does. And I'm like, absolutely not. That story just plays straight, like directly into like all the old, just the oldest and most boring racist story that's been told about black people in this country. I mean, Roach is an old, anti-black slur. And because of racism, black people were forced into poor housing conditions. And so sometimes had to live in closer proximity to the Roach. And of course, I knew all that. But to see that that line of history actually started with a Roach on a slave ship is just like. Wow. That is. Yeah, it just feels like it's just like, damn. Like, yeah, I told Cedric Simmons, the exterminator, you know, a lot of people won't treat it with with carrying hands and he spoke to this fear of mine. I think they'll weaponize it, you know, like, should I suppress this? Like everything winds up in the wrong hands. And it's like, oh, those people, they probably already know. Yeah, I just like assume. Such a big piece is probably telling people this information, you know, we live in a dystopia. But still, just putting this in my story, like, could it deepen this racist idea? Like, does it give legitimacy to the idea that some people have that black people and Roaches go together? I think that it's really, it's legitimate, the feelings of I've tried since I knew I was going to come and talk to you about cockroaches, which I also don't like them. And I I've been thinking about some of the origins of my dislike. And when I was growing up, my mom was really like, we would go over certain relatives house or whatever. And she would like make us shake everything out on our porch before we came inside the house. And she was very over the top, like vigilant about roaches and assumptions about like quelliness and some of that had to do with this idea of like shame and like socioeconomic shame. And if this says something about us, like we might end up all the money, etc. But we're fastidious. And when evidence of that is like, we don't have roaches. Yeah. The honest thing is that like, when I tell a stranger a story on the record about a Roach in my home, like there is something however small in my chest that's a little bit like, damn, now they know. Well, you have to free yourself from you have to be that yourself in that shame. From, you know, yeah, you have to free yourself of the burden of like, that routine got me to do with you. Yeah. I think of roaches in the same way that I think of rats. Again, Bethany Brookshire. These are animals that are succeeding because our social contract has failed. Right. The Roach arrived in America and succeeded because of a massive failure of a social contract that we called enslavement. Right. And they continue to succeed where social contracts fail, where racism thrives, you know, where people end up underserved and kind of forced into histories that leave them in a state of poverty and lack of opportunity. Right. And so you could see them not so much as a parallel story, so much as a symbol of the failed social contract that kind of got us here. My goal here is to regard the Roach as a Roach. And in so many ways, the Roach is not just a Roach. The Roach is a stand in for like class and race. And like all of these things that are like way more consequential than just like a bug being a bug, you know? Yeah. And all of this got me thinking about another Roach fact. I can talk about bugs forever. So Sammy told me about which is that roaches are only dirty because they live in our sewer systems, which are filthy. And just like in New York, the way we dispose of trash, what do we do with it? We stick it out on the street all night. And then the roaches crawl all over it and pick up germs and stuff. And these roaches, as gross as they can be sometimes, are constant cleaners. They're actually naturally very clean animals, cleaning their antenna almost the way that cats clean their whiskers. Making sure that they're getting rid of all the bits of foreign matter that could accumulate bacteria or fungi. They spend a lot of time trying to clean themselves of filth that they picked up from us. And it made me wonder if you take away all the different layers of human filth that we've placed on the Roach. What's left? What is that animal? Huh. Yeah. And where I'm curious, I want to hear more about like how they live on the continent that they are native to. Yeah. So like they live basically anywhere that there's vegetation. So jungle, forests, and they eat primarily organic matter. Leaves, decomposing trees, logs. They're decomposers. So they also eat like the bodies of dead animals and plants. It's so funny to think of them like not in a house or a city or something. Like that they're actually like forest creatures, you know? Yeah. Yeah. And actually I thought I would end this story by taking you there to the place they came from. We're deep in a tropical rainforest in the Congo basin. Huge trees, capocks and mahogany's tower hundreds of feet overhead. They're canobies filled with monkeys and parrots and eagles. The air is thick and humid. And on the ground, scurrying along the edge of a rotten log is a female American cockroach. And this one is about to become a mother. At the base of her abdomen is a reddish capsule called a new seca. It's shaped like a tiny kidney bean. Inside it are 16 eggs. She carries them and incubates them within this protective casing, dragging it along like a wagon. She pauses briefly to nibble at the edge of a damp leaf. She carries on, gliding effortlessly across the jagged debris that covers the forest floor until she comes across a small hole in the soft muddy soil. She pauses, looking both ways, making sure the coast is clear before dropping the uthica inside. She stares down at her children or maybe past them. One by one, she oscillates her antennae up towards the sky and back down again, slow and considered, as if reciting a prayer. And then she scurries away. A month passes. The eggs inside become tiny translucent larvae, each the size of a grain of rice. They've grown long, thin antennae, which are folded forward into a tangle of their six stringy legs. The larvae have no lungs, so they breathe through 10 little holes along the sides of their bellies. They're getting hungry and thirsty. And one day, as if responding in perfect time to an invisible conductor, all 16 babies flex the muscles in their abdomens and in unison take a giant collective breath. Their slender bodies swell with air, growing and growing and growing until the uthica pops, cutting the last tie to their mother that they've got. And together, they scatter. Some towards the river, some towards a wall of underbrush. Some up the thick trunks of 100-year-old trees, out into the forest to begin their lives. Hi, Alex Nisen and produced by Jessica Young and Annie McEwen. It was edited by Pat Walters and fact-checked by Sophie Sammie. Special thanks to Jessica Ware, Timothy Marzullo and Alexandra Bell. That's it for us. Thanks for listening. Hi, I'm Gabby. I'm from the Bay Area, California, and here are the staff credits. Radio Lab is hosted by Lulu Miller and Lentiff Nasser. Soren Wheeler is our executive editor. Sarah Sandbach is our executive director. Our managing editor is Pat Walters. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Jeremy Bloom, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Naina Sambandhan, Matt Kilti, Mona Modgauker, Alex Nisen, Sara Kari, Natalia Ramirez, Rebecca Rand, Anissa Vietze, Arian Wack, Molly Webster and Jessica Young, with help from Gabby Santis. Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Natalie Middleton, Anjali Mercado, and Sophie Sammie. Hi, I'm Aubrey, calling from Salt Lake City, Utah. Leadership support for Radio Lab's science programming is provided by the Simon Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radio Lab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.