This American Roach

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You're listening to radio lab.

Radio from WNYC. See? Okay. So do, do, do, do, do, do, do. I have to tell you a story.

All right. And I think I'm... I'm a lot of not so this is radio lab. Sitting with reporter Alex Nisa.

“So my birthday is an August and a couple summers ago.”

Here in New York. We were in the middle of this very hot, very sticky heat wave. Okay. 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. Okay.

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.

Okay. And I lifted my foot to take a step into the hallway, but right before it touched the floor,

“I felt these 30 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 serial killer. You mean like a roach like a cockroach?

And 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 up my leg. Mm-hmm. 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, scrub my foot, wrap my self 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, block up, go have to square up against the roach. The dying or dead roach. Right. Okay.

So I put on yellow rubber gloves. And then I get a lot of paper towels, saturated in water. Grab toilet bowl cleaner, you know, like the blue gel. Okay. Square it 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

And I'm just like, like, like, what, what, what, what, what, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then I get a trash bag, scoop it up and stick it in there. And then tie up super tight. Wow. Then it goes into the trash shoe.

And standing there in rubber gloves, next to the trash shoe,

“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. Okay, so is what is what we're doing here.

Like, it's like how Alex learned to stop worrying and love the roach? Ah, 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.”

Okay. Which is how I ended up at the after party. Mine is exposed in New York, probably in the day. For the New York City Pest Expo. And we get a top match, pet control companies and exterminators from all over.

There was like a roach ball? Yeah, it's like the social part. It's like 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 nightmarish 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 have at home? Oh, I have about four or five thousand bed bugs. Yeah. This is Lou Sorkin, an entomologist and pest control consultant. Only three cockroaches, species, millipede, centipede, spiders, whipped scorpion.

And right next to him, he had this huge plastic tub of cockroaches. And 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.

But they won't bother you. I just, you know, sitting, you're tasting. You could see the palps come from the mall, down and touch my skin.

“I think I might have my person I will see.”

And I was like, how are these people like that? Hi, nice to meet you. And could I get like that? Well, that's gone. Second store.

So I found some exterminators who agreed to let me follow them around. One named Lequisha Fulcher. Here we have 11 buildings, all 16 stories. She works at a public housing complex on the Lower East Side. I'm going to house you have 300 roaches.

I'm happy. Give me five days, I scoff. And also a guy named Sedric 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.

Black side is the most essential piece of the toolkit.

We went into basements and trash rooms. Much of the light on the floor. They're scattered. They're going to places like this. They showed me how to find signs that roaches were living there,

even when they're hiding. You'll be looking for marks like this. What, look like pen tapping? It'll look like Peppa, like stuck Peppa on a wall. It's road strawberries.

And of course, how to kill them. Oh, yeah. Sedric 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. 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 rate.

Yeah, it is pretty strong. It has a pretty good knockdown, too. 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 it attacks the nervous system. And it disrupts it.

And it makes them basically just incapable.

And then it succumbs them. Is it painful? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.

At some point, he pointed out a pregnant roach. Yeah, I went back there as it's exactly about to come out. I went on the wall. Yeah, the corner. And then he started spraying them.

And after about 10 minutes, they made their last twitches. How did you feel about it? Like, did you feel bad? Sort of. The sack 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.

“Honestly, what I really felt for 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 and load in their activity. Yep. And then also, that's the prime of the bat. Yeah. Okay, he saw one. I didn't freak out.

Like, the center took me in a grand central station. He took me like straight up to awkward. And let's go for it. I was seeing fat roaches and acting like it was no big deal. Ooh, big one.

Okay. I didn't like it. It's so tall. But it was nothing like before. Yeah, like this step on him.

Or I could spray it. Um. I'm not even far enough. I don't know, stepping seems kind of old school. Maybe we do that.

Oh. 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. And I saw something slightly moved in the sink.

So I looked inside and they saw antenna. And I was like, nope. Walk 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 him. Wait, what happened all your training? I don't know. I just couldn't do it. What?

I mean, first of all, Lakisha and Sedrick 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 watched 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 Yun, edible insect ambassador at Brooklyn Boggs. And we're going to show you how to eat all these bugs. Yay. 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, mommy, 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. Corpion literally adds so much flavor.

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. Oh, yeah. 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 to him being like, you're the only person I can possibly think of. Who could make me like eating a roach. Yeah. And then finally you bullied him into doing it.

He like, I fear I might have. Yeah. I might have. That's good. Fuck.

Fuck. Well, see. Okay. So what happened? Let's do it.

What's going on? Right. So me and eight of our colleagues. Right. Joseph had like very, very generously invited us to his home in Corinthians.

We're all going to try something really kind of unusual and weird.

Because he's never actually eaten an American cockroach before.

So we started with his usual dishes. Crickets and mealworms. This is the brood 19 cicadas. And it has a cricket tempera batter on it. Okay.

So this is just the warm up. Yeah. I love it. It's good. 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 have I was kind of in denial that any of this was about to happen.”

They're the fight. Frank. Yeah. Maybe I'll pull the legs off of them. Please.

First up, do beer roaches.

Uh, there might be innards that squirt in your mouth. Fried. I can't really taste anything which is ideal. Oh, something. It's mental.

Something poached the inside of my mouth. It's a leg. You think it's a leg? I, let's have, I don't know what it was. But I hated it.

Inside the batter is really good. Next, Madagascar hissing cockroaches. And he had blanched these and done nothing else. And dressed in cockroaches, but it's still a cockroach.

“He put them on a cutting board and sliced them.”

So we could slurp the inside out like an oyster. It looks like cottage cheese. But this one was not that bad. It has like a really, really good mommy's smell. Better.

Much better. It was like eggs. Huh?

And then finally, my arch nemesis.

The American cockroach. Oh. So he grabbed 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. But Joseph still grabbed a spoon. I think someone else would do it. Took a bite. What is it tastes like?

“Um, and the look on his face made me feel really guilty.”

I almost spit out what I ate. Tresherials producer, Alan Gaffinsky, also tried it. Margaret. I mean, it doesn't, um, oh yeah, there it is. Well, initially it just kind of, just was tasting sort of the garlic, like an onion.

But that smell that you guys have been smelling is. It's also a taste. It tastes like something that you shouldn't eat. Yeah. What is the roaches 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 bug's 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, another whole thing completely backfired. Yeah. So we're going to take a quick break.

Yeah, cleanse our palettes. Yeah, but after the break, things are going to get even messier. We'll be right back. This week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, a candidate for Senate who could pull off a major upset

and won't sign up for either party. All the time when you have the undecideds, I hear people like, "How could you be undecided?" I just am. I'm not just going to vote a letter.

I'll talk with Nebraska Union Leader Dan Osborn on the New Yorker Radio Hour from WNYC. Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. I'm a lot of Nasser. This is Radio Lab, back with reporter Alex Nesin,

who is just faced her deep-seated fear of the Roach in a number of unspeakable ways. Yes. But backfired and she only managed to surface her, maybe even more deep-seated discussed for them.

Yeah, I didn't want them in my life, in my city, in my state. Sure. Anywhere.

On planet Earth. Yeah. I just hate them.

And this boom likes to smile.

Sort of amidst all of this kid. I came across this book called Pest. How humans create animal villains. Hmm. By science writer.

Can I cast 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. He lives in the maple tree in front of my house,

particularly the ones that she named Kevin. I can't have who were eating all of her tomatoes. 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. 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, 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 doggy 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 pest all together. Hmm. 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 policy to be.

Like I'm going to make a t-shirt. It says abolish pests and like 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 in the frustration arises out of our own ignorance.

“Sounds like you need to, you know, walk a mile in there.”

Little weird disgusting feet. I know. I think it's time to learn about these revolting, repulsive, nauseating, offensive, terrible animals. Okay. So let's chat a little bit about the disgust response.

So I called up Entomologist Sammy Ramsey, Professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. Okay. I needed you to see what is happening on this tree. 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. Okay. 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. Listen. You're already for Dr. Sammy's story time. Yes. It's Dr. Sammy's story time.

All right, Joel. I'm going to like 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 the 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. 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 it.

Even the tiniest crack or crevice. That make people just trust 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? You're worth sort of sorcery. Did you just do? So I was listening to all this stuff. Sam, he 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 other predators, I guess.

Like these organisms are absolutely incredible and heavy.

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?

Well, apparently the name.

Paraplynida Americana. The American cockroach is a misnomer. They used to live their best lives just running around on a totally different continent. Okay. 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 crawled 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 cockroaches actually from Africa. And they climbed aboard those ships that had a bunch of unprotected food and 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 these ships. They didn't really have too much of a choice in the matter. He tells me this in this conversation. And it felt like damn. Okay. Why would you let's start this whole conversation over and just like can we just not?

It was just sort of 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. I mean, can you like what was inside of that moment for you? Well, I talk to a bunch of people about this.

Are you asking me if I feel canchered to these roasts? Nope, absolutely not. And one of them was author and my friend Angela Florenoi.

Obviously the metaphor is about because there's like the thing that I think everyone's going to do,

which is be like, oh great, shared history. Do you guys survive 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. 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 um, Yeah, it just feels like it's just like down. Yeah. I told such a Simmons the exterminator.

You know, a lot of people won't treat it with caring 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 thing is probably calling people information. You know, even as a soap. 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'm trying since I knew I was going to come and talk to you about cockroaches, which I, who I also know are really don't like them. And I, I, I've been thinking about some of the origins of my dislike. And when I was growing up, my mom was barely like,

we could go over certain relatives house, whatever. And she would like make a shake everything out on our porch before we came inside that house. And she was very over the top, like vigilant about roaches and assumptions about, like, calling this. And some of that had to do with this idea of like shame and like social economic shame.

And if this says something about us, like, we might end up all the money, et cetera, but we're for steadiest. 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 to free yourself from that shame.”

From, you know? Yeah. You have to free yourself of the burden of, like, that road thing I'm going 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, being a bug, you know? Yeah. And all of this got me thinking about another roach fact. I can talk about bugs forever.

The same he 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 a 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 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 still 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, kaypocks, and mahoganys, tower hundreds of feet overhead. There can't be filled with monkeys and parrots and eagles. The air is thick and humid.

And on the ground, screwing 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 thicka. 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 uthika inside. She stares down at her children, or maybe pass them.

One by one, she oscillates her antennae up towards a 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.

The larvae have no lungs, so they breathe through ten 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 abdomen and in unison, take a giant collective breath.”

Their slender body swell with air, growing and growing and growing until the uthika 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 hundred-year-old trees, out into the forest, to begin their lives.

[Music] [Music] [Music]

“This episode was reported by Alex Miesin, and produced by Jessica Young, and Annie McCune.”

It was edited by Pat Walters in fact checked by Sophie Sammy E.

Special thanks to Jessica Wear, Timothy Marzula, and Alexandra Bell.

That's it for us. Thanks for listening. [Music] 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 Lots of Nasser. Soren Wheeler is our executive editor.

“Sarah Sandbach is our executive director, our managing editors Pat Walters.”

Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Jeremy Bloom, W Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindu 9-A-Sambandan, Matt Kilti, Monomud Goutger, Alex Niesin, Sarah Curry, Natalia Ramirez, Rebecca Rand, Anisa Vizza, Arian Wack, Molly Webster, and Jessica Young, with help from Gabby Santas. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Natalie Middleton, Angela Mercado, and Sophie Sammy.

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