Lessons from Nazi cockroaches

Cockroaches have been around for 320 million years and will be there long after we’re gone. The photo shows a modern cockroach next to a fossilised cockroach about 108 million years old

In the nightmare, I am very small, perhaps two centimetres high. My tormentor towers over me, a hundred times taller. He is a dark brown, winged monster wearing a familiar helmet with a swastika on both sides. His paper-thin brown wings move up and down slowly, and his two whiskers sweep to and fro like a searchlight, making me shudder when they lightly graze my face.

"Ach so, scheisskopf!" he thunders in his raspy voice. "Do you admit failure? Do you surrender?" One whisker caresses my face. I can smell the sewers on it.

"Yes!" I croak, ready to be destroyed like millions of my countrymen. "You win. You will always win."

"Yes what?" he roars, some foetid juice dripping from his jaws.

"Yes, mein Herr!" I reply. "I surrender. Eat me for breakfast, I am ready."

Reality is not far from the nightmare. I have thousands of cockroaches in my Bangkok kitchen. Fully grown, they are deceptively small at 1.5 cm but they are still too fast and too clever for me. They tunnel into my potatoes, fall into my dishwashing detergent and die, they thrive in the deep cold within my fridge and they try to enter my ears when I sleep. Their babies, equally formidable, are like sesame seeds, easily invading tightly closed tins and utensils through narrow gaps, and shitting on my biscuits.

My lot are called German cockroaches (Blatella germanica). That's how I know they're leftover Nazis.

I learned something extraordinary: they have been around for nearly 320 million years, surviving floods, ice ages, droughts, dinosaur wipeouts, nuclear bombs, radioactive radiation and volcanoes. They are unkillable. All 4,600 species of cockroaches will survive Armageddon.

Suddenly I am on full alert. As you all know, we are well into the planet's seventh apocalypse. Despite the happy, clueless smiles on our faces, we are all soon going to be blips on the radar, racing towards extinction along with most other species on Earth.

Cockroaches will be around after the party's over and we are gone. An intelligent reader may ask: what can we learn from cockroaches about surviving as the world ends?

And who among us are already enough like cockroaches and therefore likely to be around when the smoke and dust settle?

Cockroaches have acquired certain valuable, survival-oriented behaviours, the result of millions of years of evolution. Let me list them for you.

They respect nothing: Nothing is sacred to a cockroach. It will go anywhere and eat whatever it finds. It demonstrates its disrespect by shitting and puking where it sleeps (in the cracks and under the tiles of your house), in the places that provide it with food and nutrition (my kitchen!) and any place in between.

They treat everything as theirs: Cockroaches have no boundaries. They will enter your fridge, your prayer room, your yoghurt and your ear when you sleep. They treat everything as made to feed them and though they prefer sweet, fatty, protein-rich foods, they will eat cloth and thin plastic at a pinch. They own you, and they own what you own.

They stay out of the light: Cockroaches, like vampires, come out at night in darkness. They prefer not to be seen as they conduct their nefarious acts of plunder, pillage and desecration. They are highly sensitive to the spotlight, and if they feel it is falling too brightly on them, they scurry away.

They rejoice in filth: Cockroaches have no standards. They see gold in garbage, and silver in slush. They prefer the drain to the palace. Their normal habitat is deep inside sewers and gutters, whence they will enter your house through the plumbing. A clean, hygienic home is to a cockroach what holy water is to a devil.

They make terrible friends: A cockroach will gladly devour a fellow cockroach at a pinch, even if it is dead. It will eat its nymphs if the situation is dire enough. The nymphs will happily eat each other as well.
It's a roach-eat-roach world.

They are cowards: They don't fight, they run. Thanks to its extraordinary threat-detection powers, a cockroach can detect approaching danger in milliseconds. Their cerci - appendages under their abdomen - are exquisitely sensitive to small changes in air currents, such as the one caused by my hand as it moves to squash it. One of the world's fastest insects, it can flee the scene of crime at nearly 5 km per hour, running straight, sideways or upside down on the ceiling.

They'd rather not know: Like certain human beings, they'd rather not see things clearly, and prefer a foggy view. They have compound eyes, made up of lenses called ommatidia, and my Nazi cockroach may have as many as 2000. But what they see is a grey blur, not details. Their eyes are designed to detect movement and changes in light.

Which kind of human being already has these valuable traits and will likely survive with the cockroach? You don't know? Oh, pish.

Well, cast your vote and come back, and I'll tell you.

You can reach C Y Gopinath at cygopi@gmail.com
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The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper.