Cockroaches: Ecology,Behavior & History (2007)

Cockroaches: Ecology, Behavior, and Natural History

The Johns Hopkins University Press | ISBN: 0801886163 | 2007 | PDF | 248 pages | 4,71 mb








"Let the lowly cockroach crawl up, or, better, fly up, to its rightful place in human esteem. Most of us, even the entomologists in whose ranks I belong, have a stereotype of revolting little creatures that scatter from leftover food when you turn on the kitchen light and instantly disappear into inaccessible crevices.


These particular cockroaches are a problem, and the only solution is blatticide, with spray, poison, or trap. I developed a better understanding when I came to realize that the house pests and feces-consuming sewer dwellers are only the least pleasant tip of a great blattarian biodiversity.


My aesthetic appreciation of these insects began during one of my first excursions to the Suriname rainforest, where I encountered a delicate cockroach perched on the leaf of a shrub in the sunshine, gazing at me with large uncockroach-like eyes.When I came too close, it fluttered away on gaily colored wings like a butterfly.


My general blattarian education was advanced when I traveled with Lou Roth to Costa Rica in 1959, and further over the decades we shared at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, as he worked as a taxonomist through the great evolutionary radiation of the blattarian world fauna."

--Edward O. Wilson, Nobel Laureate