Source webinar: Cockroaches, Dr. Dan Suiter, November 10, 2021
Series: Structural Pest Control
Duration: 54:51
CEU Categories: [PENDING: awaiting team confirmation]
Prompts: 12, covering 0:00 to 54:51 with no gaps
Segmentation note. These twelve segments sit on the chapter boundaries already published in the Stage 2 archive package. Where a prompt covers two adjacent chapters, the merge is noted. A course developer can cut the video at these times and get the same divisions the YouTube chapters use.
One soft boundary. The 31:35 cut between Prompts 7 and 8 is accurate to about six seconds. A phrase spoken up to roughly 31:35 sits inside a caption block whose window closes at 31:29, a timing artifact carried forward from the source transcription and recorded in the processing log. Cut a few seconds early if the sentence matters, or accept the overlap.
Review Tasks
Review Task 1
Watch: 0:00 – 7:39
Task: Note where cockroach diversity is highest in the United States and why, then list what separates the ACE credential from the new Certified IPM Technician.
Key Points to Identify:
- About 5,000 cockroach species worldwide; Florida has double any other state, and species counts fall off going north and west
- ACE: five years of experience, a state license, exam and CEUs, about 1,300 holders since 2004
- CIT: one year of experience, no license beyond local pesticide registration, launched the week of the talk
(Stage 2 chapters 0:00 and 1:54, merged.)
Review Task 2
Watch: 7:39 – 10:20
Task: Record the four survival figures from the food and water slide and say what the pattern shows about which resource actually limits a cockroach.
Key Points to Identify:
- Food without water: just short of two weeks, the same as complete starvation
- Water without food: more than a month for a German cockroach, three months for an American
- Suiter put the water-only figures in bed bug territory, since bed bugs go two or three months without a blood meal
Review Task 3
Watch: 10:20 – 17:42
Task: Trace what happens to excess nitrogen in a cockroach, from the food it eats to the cell that stores it and the organism that gets it back out.
Key Points to Identify:
- Every other insect voids excess nitrogen as uric acid, the white material in bird droppings; cockroaches keep theirs, because nitrogen is scarce on a tropical forest floor
- The urocyte stores the uric acid; the mycetocyte beside it houses a bacterium found nowhere but the cockroach gut, which converts that store back to usable nitrogen under starvation
- The system is obligatory: on a high protein diet the roach cannot stop making uric acid, and the gut nearly bursts packing it in
Review Task 4
Watch: 17:42 – 20:52
Task: Follow the gout connection through to the cockroach trial, and state why the approach did not become a usable product.
Key Points to Identify:
- Gout is uric acid crystallizing into knife-like slivers around the toes and ankles; allopurinol removes the enzyme that converts the precursor into uric acid
- Fed to cockroaches, the same drug let precursors build to levels they had never met, and it killed them; the University of Florida patented the use
- Speed was the problem, on the order of a growth regulator; a commercialized bait using oxypurinol took months to show a reduction
Review Task 5
Watch: 20:52 – 23:48
Task: Identify the true palmetto bug and summarize the life span and reproductive pattern shared by the large peridomestic roaches.
Key Points to Identify:
- Eurycotis floridana, the Florida woods roach: wingless, heavy, in palm trees, sprays a defensive compound that will drive you out of a room, found only in Florida
- Six to nine months as an adult after perhaps nine months of development, so a year and a half to two years overall
- One ootheca a week, and one mating produces every egg the female will ever make
Review Task 6
Watch: 23:48 – 26:29
Task: List the three harborage conditions Suiter named and convert them into an inspection list for a house call.
Key Points to Identify:
- High humidity, still air, darkness; the root “blatt” means dark loving
- Tree holes, attics, crawl spaces, soffits, hollow block walls, rotted cross ties, any void
- An attic with a leaking pipe penetration is the ecological equivalent of a tree hole, which is what produced the half inch of frass in his own 1957 house
Review Task 7
Watch: 26:29 – 31:35
Task: Explain why the large roaches take bait so readily, then describe what a residual spray costs you outdoors and what a newly hatched smoky brown looks like.
Key Points to Identify:
- Half starved for nitrogen, so any good granular scatter bait works; Suiter named Niban and Advion IG, and noted gel works but is hard to place in quantity
- The parasitoid wasp is about a sixteenth of an inch, finds an egg case from 20 feet away, lays about 80 eggs in it, and had stung roughly half the capsules recovered in his Florida study; a microcap spray kills these wasps
- First instar smoky brown: about an eighth of an inch, white band behind the head, white antennal tips, and it hatched within a couple of square feet of where you found it
(Stage 2 chapters 26:29 and 29:27, merged.)
Review Task 8
Watch: 31:35 – 36:05
Task: Catalogue the outdoor harborage sites shown in this segment and note Suiter’s position on filling tree holes.
Key Points to Identify:
- A tree hole in Athens producing 50 smoky browns a night; block wall steps holding 150 at night; another wall producing about 100
- Soffits are where roaches go because the attic interior is too hot
- Filling a tree hole creates more harborage around it rather than less; he would rather put a handful of granular bait up in the hole
Review Task 9
Watch: 36:05 – 41:48
Task: Separate American roach habitat from smoky brown habitat, then note the two species Suiter flagged as showing up locally and the formulations he remembers from the manhole era.
Key Points to Identify:
- Americans and smokies share tree holes, but smoky browns are not in the classic sewer habitat where Americans come up through manhole covers at night
- Killmaster was a Dursban paint, chlorpyrifos, brushed around the inside edge of a manhole cover; the wide, cheap tub baits of that era are gone
- Oriental cockroach: male wings cover about two-thirds of the abdomen, female wingless; the Turkestan cockroach turned up in Griffin and outcompetes the Oriental in the Southwest
Review Task 10
Watch: 41:48 – 47:10
Task: Write down the paint can trap recipe in enough detail to build one, then describe the fire ant result from the gel bait trial.
Key Points to Identify:
- Quart paint can, inside lip coated with mineral oil and Vaseline mixed one to one; white bread soaked in cheap beer in a screened cup at the bottom; always against a wall, never in the middle of the floor; up to 75 adults overnight
- The German cockroach version substitutes a baby food jar with dog food or banana
- Roaches killed by indoxacarb carry activated material in the body, so the dead roach becomes a fire ant bait and can take out whole colonies; 25 large roaches will clear a quarter’s worth of gel overnight
(Stage 2 chapters 41:48 and 44:26, merged.)
Review Task 11
Watch: 47:10 – 49:22
Task: Using the kitchen images in this segment, explain why sanitation alone will not resolve a German cockroach infestation.
Key Points to Identify:
- German roaches hide in cracks and crevices and are active at night, and a kitchen supplies dark space, water and food continuously
- You cannot keep enough water out of a kitchen to desiccate cockroaches out of it
- Food kicked under coolers that are never moved, three feet back to the wall, plus what diners drop, means food is never limiting
Review Task 12
Watch: 49:22 – 54:51
Task: Diagram one German cockroach reproductive cycle with its two phases and the days in each, then state where treatment has to go and why.
Key Points to Identify:
- She mates once, makes six or seven egg cases, and dies of old age; 35 to 45 first instars per case, about a third of her body weight
- The cycle runs roughly 10 days active and 27 days gravid; gravid means no eating, no drinking and no movement, about 75 percent of her adult life, about 90 percent of her time in harborage
- Killing males does not move the population, so aerosols go into screw holes and bait goes into cracks and crevices; crack and crevice pest control was coined by Dan Stout at Whitmire
(Stage 2 chapters 49:22 and 53:59, merged.)
Coverage Check
| Prompt | Span | Stage 2 chapter(s) covered |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 0:00 – 7:39 | 0:00, 1:54 |
| 2 | 7:39 – 10:20 | 7:39 |
| 3 | 10:20 – 17:42 | 10:20 |
| 4 | 17:42 – 20:52 | 17:42 |
| 5 | 20:52 – 23:48 | 20:52 |
| 6 | 23:48 – 26:29 | 23:48 |
| 7 | 26:29 – 31:35 | 26:29, 29:27 |
| 8 | 31:35 – 36:05 | 31:35 |
| 9 | 36:05 – 41:48 | 36:05 |
| 10 | 41:48 – 47:10 | 41:48, 44:26 |
| 11 | 47:10 – 49:22 | 47:10 |
| 12 | 49:22 – 54:51 | 49:22, 53:59 |
All 16 published chapters are accounted for, and the twelve spans tile the full runtime without gaps or overlaps.
Processed for UGA Center for Urban Agriculture / GTBOP Archives
Source: Corrected SRT (Stage 1) — GTBOP_Transcript_2021-11-10_Cockroaches.srt (741 blocks); Archive Summary (Stage 2) — GTBOP_Archive_Summary_2021-11-10_Cockroaches.md