Webinar Date: November 10, 2021
Speaker: Dr. Dan Suiter, Extension Entomologist, University of Georgia
Duration: 54:51
Series: Structural Pest Control
Credit at a Glance
| Applicator CEU | Pending confirmation. Category assignment for this archive has not been settled. Confirm with the UGA Center for Urban Agriculture before offering it for credit. |
| Likely audience category | Structural Pest Control sessions serve Georgia Category 35 (Industrial, Institutional, Structural and Health Related) licensees, but that assignment has not been confirmed for this session. |
| Archive viewing | Suitable for asynchronous use once the category is confirmed. |
Who This Is For
Licensed pest control operators and registered technicians doing structural and perimeter work in the Southeast. The biology half is the part agents will get the most mileage from with mixed audiences, including Master Gardener and homeowner groups, because it explains why roaches behave the way they do rather than listing products. The German cockroach material at the end is aimed squarely at commercial kitchen accounts.
What the Session Covers
Dr. Dan Suiter opens with eight minutes on Entomological Society of America credentials, including the Certified IPM Technician program the ESA had launched the week before for technicians with one year of experience. He then builds the rest of the hour on a single piece of biology: cockroaches are the only insects that keep excess nitrogen rather than excreting it as uric acid. They store it in fat body cells called urocytes next to mycetocytes housing a bacterium found nowhere but the cockroach gut, which breaks it back down under starvation. That explains the survival figures (a German roach lives a month on water alone, an American roach three), and it explains why the large roaches are permanently half starved and take bait so readily.
The field half covers peridomestic harborage, why granular bait beats a residual spray outdoors, a pesticide-free trapping method, secondary kill of fire ants through indoxacarb-killed roaches, and German cockroach reproduction, which ends with an argument for targeting females through crack and crevice work.
Viewing Notes for Asynchronous Use
- Total runtime is 54:51. This is the cockroach hour of a longer broadcast, and it ends cleanly. The ant segment that followed is not in this recording.
- The credentialing segment runs 1:54 to about 7:35 and is professional development, not cockroach content. If you are tight on time or the audience is not industry, start at 7:39.
- For a biology-only block, 7:39 through 20:52 is self-contained: starvation survival, the nitrogen and uric acid system, and the gout parallel. About 13 minutes.
- For a field-practice block, 20:52 through 47:10 covers harborage, baiting, trapping, and species identification without requiring the biology first, though it lands better after it.
- For German cockroach work specifically, 47:10 to the end is 8 minutes and stands alone. This is the segment to use with commercial kitchen accounts.
- There is no live audience Q&A in this recording. The Q&A pairs in the website archive version were built from the presentation body.
Pull These for Discussion
- Cockroaches keep their nitrogen; nothing else does. Every other insect excretes uric acid, the white in bird droppings. Cockroaches store it and break it back down when they starve. This one fact drives survival time, baiting response, and why they are so hard to starve out.
- An American roach lives three months on water alone. Suiter’s comparison is bed bugs. You cannot starve out either one by leaving a unit vacant.
- An attic with a leaking pipe is a tree hole. Warm, humid, dark, still air. Suiter pulled down a bathroom ceiling in his own 1957 house and half an inch of smoky brown frass came down on him. Good hook for a homeowner audience.
- Granular bait protects the wasps that are already working for you. A sixteenth-inch parasitoid finds a roach egg case by smell from 20 feet, stings it, and lays 80 eggs. Half the egg cases in Suiter’s Florida study had been stung. A pyrethroid microcap kills those wasps; bait does not.
- Expect a second wave 40 days out. Egg capsules incubate 40 days, so a knockdown followed by a rebound is the capsules hatching, not bait failure.
- The paint can trap. Mineral oil and Vaseline one to one around the inside lip, beer-soaked white bread in a screened cup at the bottom, can set against a wall. Seventy-five adults overnight. The practical answer for accounts that refuse pesticides.
- Dead roaches become fire ant bait. A graduate student in Suiter’s lab killed entire fire ant colonies by feeding them roaches killed with indoxacarb.
- Kill females, not males. A German cockroach female mates once, is gravid about 75 percent of her adult life, and during those 27-day stretches does not eat, drink, or move. Suiter’s deer analogy (12 does, two bucks) lands with almost any Georgia audience.
Resources to Share
- entsoc.org: ESA certification programs. ACE, ACE International, Board Certified Entomologist, the Public Health Entomology Certificate, and the Certified IPM Technician. Useful for agents fielding questions from technicians about career credentials.
- Cockroaches of the United States: Tom Atkinson’s distribution review, published by the Entomological Society of America. Searchable as “cockroaches of the US.”
Processed for UGA Center for Urban Agriculture / GTBOP Archives
Source: Stage 2 Archive Package — GTBOP_Archive_Summary_2021-11-10_Cockroaches.md