Speaker: Dr. Dan Suiter, Extension Entomologist, University of Georgia
Moderator: addressed on air as “Richie”; not captioned
Duration: 54:51
Series: Structural Pest Control
Webinar Date: November 10, 2021
Scope note. This transcript covers the cockroach hour of a longer broadcast. Dr. Suiter closes at “It’s about four o’clock” and hands back to the moderator; the ant segment that followed is not part of this recording.
Three bracketed [INAUDIBLE] markers appear inline at Blocks 147, 217 and 253. Each marks a stretch of silence where the transcription engine wrote a stock phrase onto no speech. They are retained so the prose accounts for every block in the source.
Cockroaches of the Southeast
Dan Suiter: Welcome everybody. So I am going to talk a little bit about cockroaches today. Some of this is, it’s in parts of this you’ve, some of you have probably seen before, but it’s worth, it’s worth reiterating some of the information I’m going to talk about on some of the biology of some of these critters. And it’s, this is mainly talk about the, we’ll concentrate a little bit on German cockroaches, but it’s mainly a more of a a large breadth of cockroaches of the southeastern US.
And most of what we’re gonna talk about here, the larger peridomestic cockroaches have a worldwide distribution. So if you’re a little bit further north, you may not have the the diversity of cockroach species that we have down here in Georgia. Lucky you, I guess. But you have some of the more pest species. Interestingly, there are about 5,000 cockroach species worldwide. And of course, Florida, there was a review of the cockroaches of the United States published several years ago by Tom Atkinson.
If you just search cockroaches of the US, there was a nice little bulletin that came up. the Entomological Society of America published this thing, and it was a distribution of all the cockroach species in the US. And of course, Florida had double the amount that any other state had. And the further north and the further west you went, the number of species kind of dropped off. But so yeah, the Southeast is like that, you could say the same thing about ants.
and lots of other critters that are dealt with by the pest control industry in the south and southeast, because of our abundant rainfall and warm temperatures, you know, we have more bugs than most other people.
Entomological Society of America Credentials
But one of the things I wanted to, before I got going on that, I promised some folks at the Entomological Society of America that I would talk a little bit about their credentialing program. My professional society is called the Entomological Society of America, and it’s been in existence, 1800s. It’s a, it’s a really old organization. And it’s one time a year they get together, and people share their research and anything that’s insect related.
And these are people from almost all universities in the US. you know, industry and it’s just a number of people get together. Well, this year it was a hybrid virtual and face to face. We did not meet last year, but this year was in Denver last week and I went and One of the things that was being talked about was a new program called the CIT. I’m going to talk about CIT in just a minute, but it’s strictly for pest control technicians. It’s why they developed this.
Many of you are probably aware of the ACE program and I’ll talk a little bit about the ACE program, the Associate Certified Entomologist program. There’s also an ACE International, so we may have some folks in Canada that are listening right now. We have several people that participate from Canada every month, but there’s an ACE and an ACE International. There’s a board certified entomologist, which are for, that’s a certification for people who are degreed entomologists, right?
So you can up your game a little bit by becoming a board certified entomologist, just like any other profession, you become board certified. And then just last week on November 2nd, The ESA unveiled a program called the Certified IPM Technician, and this is strictly for pest control technicians. So the ACE program was meant mainly as a credential for, in Georgia, for instance, it would be a certified operator. And people that are in a, have had five years, just to sit for the exam for the ACE, I think you have to have five years of experience.
So, it does not exclude technicians, but this new program, the certified IPM technician, the CIT program, is specifically for technicians to try to allow, to provide technicians a credential, a new credential. It’s credentials that come from the Entomological Society of America. And then there’s another one called the Public Health Entomology Certificate.
The ACE Program
So the ACE, the Associate Certified Entomologist Program, started back in 2004. There are probably some people that are here listening right now. If you’re an ACE, it’s a feather in your cap. There are only 1,300 of them globally. So if you’re an ACE, you know that you studied really, really hard to get that certification. It’s a… It’s a bear, and it’s a bear to study for and to pass. I think they may have reduced the number of continuing education hours that are required to keep your ACE, but it’s still a pretty rigorous program.
Eligibility is based on your experience. I think it’s five years and then some of your life. Of course, you have to be licensed in your state. Of course, the international program was launched in 2014. And NPMA is, this is a, not just the ESA worked with NPMA to help develop this program.
The Certified IPM Technician
And then last week or back in November 1st, on Monday, it was a week ago, Monday, The first, the newest ESA credential was launched and it was aimed at those pest control technicians who are just maybe just starting in their career or have been a technician for you know six, seven, eight, ten years and want to acquire some type of credential to advance themselves. There’s no licensing requirements other than your local pesticide application, so you have to be registered.
In Georgia, you’d have to be a registered technician. There’s an exam and there are CEUs that have to be acquired. So if you look at this across the top here, here’s the ACE program. So, requires a license of course. and the CIT does not. Years of experience, five for the ACE, just one for the CIT for technicians. And then exam is required, exam and CEUs are required for the ACE program and for the CIT program. So if you want more information about this for your technicians, I’d love to see.
Frankly, I’d love to see Georgia lead the country in both ACEs and CIT people. Be a feather in the cap for Georgia. Anyway, if you want to know more about this, you can contact this gentleman right here. He’s kind of over overseeing the ESA certification programs, or you can contact me and I’ll put you in touch with these folks but entsoc.org. is the website, the ESA’s website. And if you just look at the certification programs there, you can get an idea of what these programs entail in a little bit more detail.
In cost, there is a cost involved with these things, but it’s one of the few credentialing programs I think that we have that would be a… pretty attractive to technicians.
Food and Water Requirements
Okay, so I want to say about that, some pretty new stuff. So let’s talk a little bit about roaches. And I’m going to talk broadly about You know, the large, the big roaches, and we’ll talk a little bit about German cockroach biology. And there’s one particular, I talk about this all the time because it’s so important, the behavior and biology of female male cockroaches. So, There was, this was early work that was done gosh, 50 years ago.
And some of you I’m sure have seen this slide right here, where, you know, the researcher just wanted to know what were the food and water requirements for for cockroaches, right so they took a bunch of German cockroaches and they, they held a bunch of them where they gave food but they didn’t give them water. took another group and they gave them water, but not food. And then they took another group and they just completely starved and didn’t give them food or water.
So if you give them food but not water, they live about just short of two weeks, which is about the same amount of time as if you just completely starve them. Look what happens here if you give cockroaches just water. Now, a German cockroach, pretty small cockroach, is three quarters of an inch long. If you give a German cockroach water, it can live more than a month on just its fat body reserves. I’m going to talk about this in just a sec.
This is really cool stuff with cockroaches. They are truly unique in the insect world. It’s probably why I was attracted to them in graduate school, because I worked on American cockroaches for my PhD. It’s a really successful insect, has a worldwide distribution, and it’s not going anywhere, right? Look at an American cockroach. If you give an American cockroach water, but you don’t give it any food to eat, it can live three months.
And when I talk about this, I say, you know, that’s bed bug territory. You know, bed bugs can live two or three months without a blood meal. And it makes them just go into some type of torpor, and they go into a, just an inactive stage. Bedbugs do when they don’t have food, and that causes them to move in search of food, right? But they can go months. This is a problem, right? So if somebody moves out of an apartment, you won’t starve them out.
You’re not gonna starve out bed bugs. And apparently you’re not gonna starve out cockroaches either. So by just giving them water. [CLEARS THROAT]
Nitrogen and the Uric Acid System
So I put this slide in here to remind myself to talk about this whole issue of nitrogen and the system. It’s such unique biology for cockroaches that it’s… It’s- it’s worth mentioning over and over again. So, cockroaches are truly really unique creatures.
Insect Diversity and the Tropical Origin of Cockroaches
So, when an insect, you know, there are about, I guess, 2 million, maybe 1 million different species of insects that are known to science. If you talk to, [INAUDIBLE: silence; ASR artifact “Bye.”] If you talk to entomologists, they’ll tell you, people that go down and look for new species of insects, they go to the most remote parts of the world. Every time they go down there, they find new species of insects that are new to science.
And so they’ll tell you that their estimate is that we know of 1 million, there are probably 3 to 5 million species of insects on the globe. That most of the insects, most of the insect species are not known. A couple years ago, I was conducting a study of the ants of Brunswick, Georgia. We’re just going into local parks, collecting ant species. And I didn’t know that much about identifying them. I had to work with somebody in Gainesville, Florida to identify them.
And I sent him a sample, and this is in a local park in Brunswick, Georgia. I collected one that he said did not have a scientific name. It was not known to science. So here was something right underneath people’s feet that was an ant species in a particular genus that had never been collected, never found, and never described. So the point I’m trying to make here is that the diversity of insects is really, really large.
And they’re mostly tropical. Cockroaches are cockroaches are really tropical. They’re right along the equator. So, they’re a few degrees on either side of the equator is where your abundance of cockroaches are. And so, they live in these really highly tropical rainforest type areas.
Why Cockroaches Keep Their Nitrogen
And insects in general, when they feed on something, when they eat something, you’ve got to take in nutrients. And one of the nutrients, of course, is nitrogen. Right? So, nitrogen is used to make proteins. So, when your body is your body, and an insect’s body is synthesizing proteins, they have to use nitrogen to make that protein. Well, insects take in more nitrogen than they can actually use at that moment. So, it comes out the other end and they get rid of it.
As in a form of a chemical called uric acid and it has a white look to it. It’s a, think of a bird poop, you know, the white bird poop that you see, that’s uric acid. The white is bird poop. So, insects excrete, they excrete their excess nitrogen as uric acid, except cockroaches. cockroaches actually hold on to that excess nitrogen. So if they’re in an environment where, you know, they’re in a big forest, big tropical rainforest where they can’t fly, they’re crawling around on the forest floor, they’re crawling around the trees, there’s not a lot of nitrogen for them to eat.
Nitrogen comes in the form of dead animals. So, a dead bat, a dead bird, a dead lizard, whatever it might be, those dead things are rare. So if you’re a cockroach living on the forest floor and you’re eating dead leaves and fungi and stuff like that, you don’t have a whole lot of nitrogen sources. So when one does come by and you eat it, and you utilize the nitrogen at that moment, don’t get rid of the rest of it, keep it.
So that’s what they do. And this is, cockroaches are unique in doing this. They, no other insect does this. They store it and they store it as fat. So. The best recollection you might have of fat body in a cockroach is when you step on an American roach, that white stuff that comes out, that’s all uric acid. And that is gold to a cockroach.
Urocytes, Mycetocytes, and the Gut Bacterium
So, what they do is they’ll, there’s multiple, there’s three different cell types in a fat body. And one is called a urocyte. CYT just means cell and uro means uric acid. There’s a cell called a urocyte that this excess nitrogen is made into uric acid and it goes into this cell and it’s stored in that cell. Right next to it is another cell called a mycetocyte. And that is a cell that only stores bacteria. And this is a species of bacteria that’s found in cockroach gut in nowhere else on the globe.
It’s only found in a cockroach gut. So when the cockroach starts becoming starved, it has to utilize the nitrogen that’s tied up as uric acid. This bacteria goes in and breaks down the uric acid into usable nitrogen, and the cockroach can then survive starvation. That’s why they can go live three months without, without just giving them water. They can go three months without starvation. This is a system that… [INAUDIBLE: silence; ASR artifact “Bye-bye.”]
is what we call obligatory. So cockroach cannot, they can’t stop this system. There were studies, we did it too. There were studies that were published that if you give a cockroach a high protein diet in a kitchen, they’re not really eating, they may be eating a piece of chicken that’s high protein, food, fish, that kind of thing, steak, that’s high protein. But a lot of it is just grease. And they’re forging for, German cockroaches are forging for something.
But if you give them a really high protein diet and nothing else, they’re obligated to make uric acid. They can’t stop the process to the point that their gut almost explodes. with uric acid, that they’re trying to pack that uric acid in there. They’re eating a high protein food. They actually can’t stop. They can’t stop it. And their gut, their gut nearly explodes because there’s so much uric acid in there.
Gout, Allopurinol, and a Patented Use
When I was in Florida, we worked on a, there’s a human connection here. And I talk about this every time I talk about this uric acid system, because there’s a connection between cockroaches and you. And if there’s somebody listening out there that’s ever had gout, you know that gout is uric acid. The way you make your uric acid in your blood is the same way cockroaches make uric acid in their body. If you have a molecule of uric acid here, it was something before that.
Right. And so that whatever it was before that is called a precursor to uric acid. So there’s a there’s an enzyme that actually converts that precursor into uric acid. So. [INAUDIBLE: silence; ASR artifact “Thank you.”] drugs, a human drug is meant to remove that enzyme. So it used to be, there was a drug called allopurinol and it was a pill that you took and you absorbed it into your blood. And what it did was it took that enzyme, the allopurinol came in and grabbed that enzyme from the system and it removed that enzyme from the system and it prevented the buildup of uric acid.
As you know, uric acid is a buildup of… of, it’s, well, gout is a buildup of uric acid into knife-like slivers, and they concentrate around your toes and your ankles, and it’s really, really painful. And so when you take this blood, you take this. This allopurinol pill removes the enzyme from the system and you have precursors that build up and PML. [VERIFY: “PML”] And you don’t have any more uric acid. We did the same, we gave that same drug, allopurinol, to cockroaches and it killed them.
Because we had this, there was no more uric acid buildup, but those precursors built up to toxic levels that the cockroaches had never experienced before. Now it took a long time to do this, but it actually killed them, and the University of Florida patented that use of a human drug for cockroach control. And it turned out it was too slow. It was just way too slow. There’s a couple, there was one commercialized bait that had oxypurinol as the active ingredient.
Some of you have been in the industry a long time, might remember this. Long time ago, it was a bait that had oxypurinol, but it took, it’s like a growth regulator. It takes months and months and months to get a reduction. But in the trials that we did, It prevented, it took a long time, but cockroaches that ate bait laced with allopurinol saw a major reduction in their numbers. So, I told you I was going to cover this, I probably spent too much time on it, but it’s really cool stuff.
Cockroaches are the ultimate cool insect. They are, some of them are pretty gross, but I’m gonna show you some pictures here in a little bit of some that are. quite attractive. They’re strikingly pretty. And there’s an article, I talked about this too, there’s an article published years ago, I want to get it, I can’t remember, I’m going to have to see if I can get it online, but it was National Geographic, it was cockroaches of the world.
And some of the cockroaches and some of the images of the roaches in that publication were every bit as beautiful as any, any swallowtail butterfly you’d ever seen. There are some really incredible looking cockroaches. Some really nasty ones too, when we deal with those.
Peridomestic Cockroaches and the True Palmetto Bug
So, I’m going to talk a little bit about peridomestic cockroaches here. I don’t know how far I’ll get here, but we’ll, we’ll take a break close to four o’clock and then We’ll start talking about ants. But, peridomestic cockroaches, or anything that’s big, right? So this is, if you’re from the South, or from, especially from Florida, you’re called a palmetto bug. There truly is a palmetto bug. There is a cockroach that has a common name, it’s called palmetto bug.
And it’s Eurycotis floridana, a Florida woods roach. It looks like a UGA linebacker. This thing is that big, it’s wingless, and it has weight. It lives in palm trees. And they have this chemical defensive compound that they spray. When you really irritate them, they’ll spray it. I mean, they’ll spray it at a distance and it’s a really pungent odor and you have to leave the room. was to trap these things and it would have a show the trap here in just a few minutes.
There was a one quart paint can and we would trap them to see how well our treatments worked or whatever. And every time we would get these things in, raccoons would find these traps and eat all the cockroaches and they would never ever eat one of these smoky, one of these large palmetto bug roaches, the Florida woods roach, because they would bite into this thing and we would get roaches back that would have fang marks where the raccoon had bit into the cockroach and got a mouthful of yuck from the roach and spit it out.
But this is, you only find these in Florida. It’s a Florida woods roach, big old honking thing.
Longevity, Egg Cases, and Mating Once
But in large part, these peridomestic roaches, the large roaches, basically the non-German roaches, They live a long time. They’ll live a year, right? So, they may live six to nine months as an adult. And it may have taken nine months to get to become an adult. So, this is a long-lived insect. It may be a year and a half to two years old as an insect. Their eggs are protected in an egg case. You’ll know them as a, you’ve called it an ootheca. It’s in the egg pouch.
You’ve all, everybody has seen that egg case. They produce one a week. So when a, when one of these large roaches becomes an adult, they mate. They got to mate one time. This is a, it’s another common thread in biology of roaches and some moth species, especially Indianmeal moth in German roaches. You got to mate one time. They’ve got to mate one time to produce all the eggs they’ll ever make. They don’t have to mate every time they produce eggs like vertebrates do.
Of course, they’re not active and most common in Georgia, of course, is smoky brown roach. In American roach, smoky brown roach is actually from Japan, originally. And American roach, I think, is from Africa.
Harborage: Warm, Humid, Still, and Dark
So, the one thing in common that these cockroaches have is, where you find them harboring, is our environments where the humidity is high, and the air movement is very still, and it’s dark. The term blatt, B-L-A-T-T, which is Blattaria, Blattodea, Blattella, that root, B-L-A-T-T, means dark loving. So, when you see roaches, you see them in the dark. Middle of the day. You’re not going to see German roaches if you do you probably don’t want to go inside.
You don’t want to hang around, but generally cockroaches come out at nighttime we know this from the work that we do. So, if you look at peridomestic cockroach habitats, it’s things like tree holes, attics, crawl spaces, any void. Any. voided block wall, anything of that sort. So, and it’s a combination of warm, no wind, and moisture. Right? And that is the definition of an attic with a leak. And in the South, if you have pipes penetrating an attic, you’re gonna have a leak.
An Attic With a Leaking Pipe
And this is personal experience, but we bought a house, we’ve been in it 20 years now, but when I bought it about 1957 and did some renovations and it had a major smoky brown cockroach problem. And I can remember going into the… the bathroom and pulling down the drywall, we’re gonna redo the drywall in the ceiling and pulled it down and this wave of cockroach, smoky brown cockroach crap came down on me. It was about a half an inch thick.
And it was because there was a pipe that penetrated the roof and it leaked, had been leaking for years. And that… Attic was like a big old tree hole. It was a perfect habitat for cockroaches. I finally got up in the attic. This is a picture of my attic here on the left. Redid all the insulation up there and had all those pipes cut off and fix the attic. But a lot of times, smoky brown roach problems indoors.
Baiting the Large Roaches
They’re living indoors or even if they’re living in walls, or a lot of times they’ll be living in the attic. So if you can get something in the attic, especially the soffits, the attic itself a lot of times is too hot, but if you have a little bit of air movement in the soffits if you can get granular baits or anything of like that into those areas, that’ll work pretty good. These roaches are half starved. Because of that whole uric acid thing, these roaches will eat anything.
They’re really baitable. These large roaches are any good granular bait, Niban, Advion IG, you can gel bait them, but it’s hard to put out the amount of gel. But it’s good granular scatter bait for these roaches will do wonders. They do love gel baits too because of the water. But I actually prefer those.
Egg Case Parasitoids and What a Spray Costs You
A reason I say this is there are a host of parasites that we never see. It’s one of these things that you never see these things, but there’s a host of parasites and little wasps. that attack the egg capsules of these things. And I did some work in Florida years ago, there’s a wasp. It’s literally about that big. It’s maybe a 16th of an inch. It’s like a gnat, like a South Georgian gnat. And the females are actually attracted to the smell.
We identified the odor, the chemical that comes off these egg cases. And these wasps will… they’ll be attracted from 20 feet away and they’ll find that egg case. And if it’s in a tree hole, they’ll search until they find it. They sting it and they lay 80 eggs in it. That’s how small the wasp is. They eat the entire contents. All the baby cockroaches that are in there that are developing. And then they chew a hole in and they all emerge at the same time.
They mate and then those females… which are about 80% of the wasps, start looking for additional egg cases to attack. And the study we did in Florida showed about half the egg cases that we recovered were stung by this wasp. So I guess the point I’m trying to make here is… If a bait will work, you know, something like a microcap, pyrethroid microcap would probably work too. So you could spray a wall or, you know, a tree hole, anything of that sort.
That’s going to work, but it’s also going to kill the parasites. And so just by doing something like switching to a granular bait, handfuls of granular bait, and the granule will stay there a long time with a, with a, with a liquid spray. You know, we did some ant trials here this summer and we put out a, we put out a liquid residual two nights later, we got five inches of rain. I’m not sure if anything was there later.
But with a bait like that, if it’s in a protected environment, you still have bait available for a long time. And keep in mind, when these egg cases hatch, you’ll kill a lot of the adults here when you first put out the bait, but these egg capsules incubate for 40 days. And so you, it may be a little while longer, but you’re going to get another influx of cockroaches when all these egg capsules hatch.
Smoky Brown Roach: Egg Capsule to First Instar
horses, smoky brown roaches from East Asia. You all know what this thing looks like. [VERIFY: “horses”] It’s throughout the southeast. I don’t think it’s ever gotten up into Canada, but another question. And of course, there’s the egg caps. Everybody knows what the egg capsule is. Here’s our first instar smoky brown cockroach, recently hatched from an ootheca. I put this picture in here because a lot of people don’t know what this is.
A lot of times they’ll carry their, if they’re walking, they’ll carry their butt up in the air. This thing’s about maybe an eighth of an inch long. And they came out of this egg capsule right here. And they got this white band right behind their head, and they have white tips to their antennae. And this is their life. When they hatch from that egg case, these first instars, if you ever find a first instar smoky brown roach or German roach or anything like that, it’s hatched within a couple square feet of where you find it.
So that’s their life.
First Instars, Fecal Matter, and the Domino Effect
And at least in German roaches, the primary food of German roaches, first instar German roaches, is their mother’s fecal matter. So this is why we talk about this domino effect where cockroach will eat a bait and it will die. But before it dies, it poops out. And it has active ingredient in its poop any roach that come to needs that poop will die. And that actually occurs with with German roaches pretty good actually goes another another level with Advion bait so.
We may talk about that when we talk about German roaches here in a minute. Yeah, here’s a video of some good videos of smoky brown roaches in some of our lab stuff. These are little smoky brown roaches. You see the little white lines there, and that’s an American roach there on the lower left is either American roach or a, and there’s a big smoky brown cockroach coming in.
Tree Holes, Soffits, and Block Wall Voids
We talked about tree hole habitats. These, we’ve got these very common place for smoky brown cockroaches to harbor are these harbor sites where you have these large tree holes and that’s the equivalent, basically the equivalent, ecological equivalent of an attic that has a moisture issue. warm, humid, and no air movement. And this was in Athens, this picture right here is in Athens, but everybody, you’ve got one of these in your yard.
And if you go out at nighttime, in July and August, you’ll see smoky brown roaches coming out of these things. And that is a… that could very well be a source of of smoky brown cockroaches that maybe are are wandering in from from these things um these tree holes but uh a handful of bait i’m this tree hole right here had a large population of smoky brown at night time 50 roaches that come out of this hole right here And just removing, I’m not a big believer in trying to fill these holes up.
People do this to try to make the tree look better or whatever, but all you really do when you do something like that is you create more habitat for roaches. That’s all you’re doing. And you’re actually creating area around that tree hole where more roaches can live because you’re creating harborage space. This is at my house when we started redoing some of the fascia boards. This is in the outer area here, the soffits.
And you can see that’s where the cockroaches go to keep cool, because the internal part of the attic is so hot. any void, right? So any block wall has got voids behind it. There’s no such thing as a solid block wall, unless it’s poured concrete, of course. But if you’ve got something like this, you’ve got granite, you know, that granite is actually probably sitting on a poured wall, or some other, well maybe concrete block that’s got screen on it.
and this granite has got mud on it and it’s put onto the screen and it’s hanging on the screen, right? So there’s voids all behind this. So at nighttime you go out to this wall right here, you know in the daytime, let’s say you go out to this wall and roaches are coming out of every void that’s there. And you’ll have 150 smoky brown roaches on these steps right here at nighttime. Same with cross ties, rotted cross ties, anything of that sort.
Here’s a, this is in a local park, and it just looks like a, you know, these blocks are hollow, right, so we would go out we would trap cockroaches at nighttime to bring them back to the lab and do experiments with. But, you know, would go out and you look at this area and it’s just full of smoky brown roaches. If you go out here in the daytime and you don’t see anything, but you go out here at nighttime and I’ll tell you, there’s a little bit of a crack right here.
That crack right there, a little bit of gel bait, this is backup, a little bit of gel bait, even one of these cracks right here, just a gel, a smear of gel right there, that’s where the roaches come out at nighttime. This wall right here, I’ll tell you, we would have a hundred, maybe a hundred smoky brown cockroaches coming out of that wall at night time. They’re living in the blocks. And just some granular baits. There’s another void. Tree holes are, I don’t recommend that you do this too often because of, you know, squirrels and probably not raccoons, but maybe possums, things like that could be living in these tree holes. But if you’ve all seen this, you see a if you could stick your head up in there, this is what you would see, right? There’s a big void that goes way up in that tree. This tree is going to fall over at some point. The next big gust of wind is going to die, but the point here is, at nighttime, some smoky brown roaches would come out in a huge population of carpenter ants in that tree right there.
American and Brown Roaches
Okay, this is the American and brown roach. They’re very similar. I’m not going to differentiate between the two here, but the brown cockroach Periplaneta brunnea has slightly different biology than the American cockroach. They are a little bit different. But these are large, these are big roaches, right? So these are the largest of the ones that we deal with. Their biology is a little bit different than where you find them.
Their ecology is a little bit different than where you might find smoky brown roaches. I have found smoky browns and Americans living in the same tree hole together happily, but where you’ll principally find Americans, you won’t find smokies. So, Americans will live with smokies in tree holes in in other locations, but you’re typically not going to find smoky brown roaches living in the classic habitats that like a like a sewer, where you might find American roaches.
Sewers and Manhole Covers
So here is a sewer. It’s a sewer situation at nighttime. There’s a smoky brown roach right there. There’s another one right there. They just, I don’t know, they want to be friends with the American roaches here. But most of all the rest of these are American roaches and they’re coming up out of these manhole covers at night time. And I tell the story of years ago at Purdue, we were doing, we would do cockroach research with American roaches and you’d have a manhole cover like this in the pavement and a car would come by and run over a bunch of these roaches and kill them and squash them and all their mates would run back into the sewer and a few minutes later there you see these antennae come out and they would come out and they would start eating The ones that are just, they’re so starved, there’s so much, that’s why they’re so baitable.
They come out and they start looking for something to eat. And the first thing they find is a squashed mate. And they go straight for the uric acid. That’s all they eat. They go straight for the uric acid.
The Old Paste and Paint Formulations
So, some of you have been in the industry a long time, remember, I think it was a Dursban product called Killmaster. Do you remember that? It was a paint. You would take this manhole cover off and paint it around the inside edge. It was white. It was almost like a paste and you would paint it on. It was chlorpyrifos. It was a good product. And that and there were, we don’t have any of these baits anymore. Most of the baits are in gel, most of the good gel baits we have come in like a syringe now, but there used to be tubs of bait.
We need a really good… wide, cheap bait, wide scale bait, you get two, three pounds of it at a time in a paste. There was something called, it works in blue diamond, two different boric acid baits, [VERIFY: “it works in blue diamond”, two boric acid bait product names] and it was blue, and you would put it on with a knife, and the cockroaches just loved, these large roaches loved it. The problem with using inexpensive bait is these roaches can eat a lot of bait. I mean, tubes of it.
You’ve got large populations in an elevator shaft or something like that. They can eat a lot of bait. They can eat a lot of gel bait. Now we’ve got some American roaches here. This is a pretty cool video where we had a bunch of American roaches put in this tub right here. I think at some point, coming up, they’re going to give me a little bit of a surprise. see the first and second and third instar. Americans there and then this one comes up here on the camera.
And then we had other videos of more of these big old stinky American cockroaches that were doing kind of doing their thing. We’ll try to get some new videos for next time.
Oriental and Turkestan Cockroaches
So that’s American and smoky brown we have, you know, we have oriental cockroaches we, we have not seen oriental cockroaches in this area in Georgia here in Griffin in quite some time there was a local park here. where they had shown up. I’m gonna show you another cockroach here in just a second called the Turkestan cockroach that showed up right here in Griffin. It was mainly known from the Southwestern United States.
It out-competes the Oriental cockroach. So it has completely outcompeted the Oriental cockroach out in the southwest. But this is what the males of an Oriental cockroach have wings that only cover about two-thirds of the abdomen. The female is wingless. This looks a lot like that big cockroach from Florida. I was telling you about the Florida woods roach, that real big honking thing. Again, these are not from the U.S.
These oriental roaches eating some bait that we put out at the park here in Griffin. Talked about this already, so baiting these roaches is, or a handful of bait up in tree holes, things like that are a really good way to go. Here’s an ootheca that has been parasitized by a parasite. And this is a, that hole that you see right there is a hole that a that a small little wasp that thing that’s only a So, as when that actually chewed a hole to get out and then 60 or 80 of its buddies actually emerged from that in case that’s how small these things are.
Trapping Cockroaches Without Pesticides
Cockroach researchers have forever. As long as I can remember, you have to have a need, you have to have a way of evaluating your cockroach population non-destructively. So if you want to trap cockroaches for some reason, the reason I bring this up here is in some situations you may have a case where somebody doesn’t want to use pesticides. seeing more of that. Whether it’s a spray or a bait, somebody, maybe they don’t, they got dogs, you know, hunting dogs or whatever, they don’t want to use any type of bait. This is a really good system to trap a lot of cockroaches very quickly.
So we take a quart can, which I had it. I don’t have a cup. I don’t have one here, but this is just a quart paint can. I got at Home Depot. You take a little bit of mineral oil and Vaseline, mix them one-to-one to get this slickness and you coat the inside. inside lip of this paint can with that mineral oil Vaseline. And then you take a cup, some type of small cup, and a piece of screen, and you take white bread, and you pour cheap beer into, don’t waste good beer, pour cheap beer onto this white bread, and you take that white bread, that soaked white bread, and you put it in this cup, you put a screen over the top of it.
It’s really pungent. And you take that, you put that in the bottom of the can, and you put that against a wall somewhere where you’ve seen these large roaches. And at night time, you’ll come back the next morning. And we did it last summer. We got, typically, this was common, the trap catch you see here, but there were times where we would catch 75 adult cockroaches in a paint can overnight. And then you just put some hot soapy water in there and be done with it and then you can redo the can.
That’s a really good way to trap cockroaches. We do it for German roaches too. What they’ll do is use it rather than paint cans, they’ll use baby food jars and just put a little bit of Vaseline on the inside of the baby food jar, put some attractant, maybe a piece of dog food or a banana works really well because it’s so pungent. always put these traps against the wall because roaches that are… Don’t put them out in the middle of the floor somewhere.
Always put them against the wall and then the smell wafts up and the cockroaches come down and fall in the trap and can’t get out.
Gel Bait in the Field and Fire Ant Secondary Kill
We did some work in this park here locally with some cockroach. some cockroach gel. This is when Advion was first coming out. The real good Advion gel for German roaches is years ago, 10 years ago now, but before it actually got its label we wanted to just play with it in a local park. And so of course there were smoky brown roaches and American roaches and brown roaches behind this wall right here. You put out a little bit of gel.
and boom, come out at nighttime and they immediately begin to consume the bait. And then, then they all started to die. The next day you come out here and die. I had a grad student that just, she just finished, went to work for Valent, but she had a project where she was collecting these roaches and there’s a secondary kill of fire ants. So, Some of you may have noticed this, when you kill a lot of these large roaches like this outside, or you kill anything, kill large populations of insects on the outside, in the south, one of the first things that comes after them is fire ants.
And, and And when we do our, we kill, do our cockroach kill like this, inevitably it’s always fire ants that come after these dead roaches. And we were taking these, she was taking these dead roaches and doing it in a lab and in the field like this, and feeding them to fire ant colonies and killing the entire fire ant colony because it was bait left over. There was, you have a cockroach that was killed by indoxacarb.
There’s an indoxacarb, activated indoxacarb, still in the cockroach. The cockroach is now a fire ant bait. And so you’re actually not just killing the cockroaches, you’re actually killing, having an impact on the fire ants as well. It was a pretty cool little study. So again, this is the gel. And by the way, it’s not just Advion, any gel you put out here, they will react this way to it because they’re half starved. And they come out, you know.
That was a really cool video of a. An American cockroach eating, I can’t remember what kind of, what gel that was, but when they start chewing on the bait, they can eat a lot of bait. This cockroach, I can’t remember, it ate half of this, it’s amazing the amount of bait that they ate. This cockroach right here ate probably half of that pile of bait right there. And we’ve had, we in our trials, we’ll go in, we’ll have 25 of those large roaches, and we’ll put out the amount that would fit on a quarter.
It’ll come back the next day, it’s all gone. So they really can eat you out of house and home.
German Cockroaches: Food and Water Are Never Limiting
In just a few minutes, let me talk a little bit about German roaches. So I wanted to make this point right here. So, Um… So German roaches, of course, hide in cracks and crevices because of that. They are cockroaches, of course, and they’re most active at nighttime. So I guess the point I’m trying to I wanted to make here is we go into a kitchen area like this. There’s lots of dark spaces. There’s lots of water. You’ve never been in a kitchen there where there was not enough water to keep cockroaches alive or food, for that matter. Right. So.
Going back to this situation right here, you probably can’t keep enough water out of a kitchen to actually desiccate cockroaches out. You can’t. We’ve already talked about this right here, but. Ask yourself this point right here, the last kitchen you were in, whether you were eating there or you were in the middle of the night doing a treatment. You go into, and this was actually a pretty clean kitchen, but it’s an older kitchen.
Ask yourself, is food or water limited anywhere in that environment right there? Of course it’s not. And this is right outside that prep area that I just showed you. This is where the lady is serving food. Is food or water limited anywhere right here? No. She’s got the food right there. She’s always spilling food on the floor. She’s kicking it under these coolers over here. It’s three feet back to the wall. These coolers are never moved.
Of course, there’s food underneath there and then of course, you know, the people that are eating in the in the dining area are always dropping food so that I the point I’m trying to make here in these environments, food and water not limited, it doesn’t take a roach whole lot of food to survive. And of course. They go a long time without food, but they can’t go very long without water, but water is not limited in a kitchen.
German Cockroach Reproductive Biology
So, German roaches have this really peculiar biology. It’s really interesting. And many insects do this. So, in their talk a little bit about their reproductive biology, keep this in mind. This is important. A male cockroach can inseminate multiple females. Right? So you’ve got a population of males in any kitchen, you got a population males, a population of females. So they go through six or seven instars, they turn into an adult, the female releases a pheromone, attracts a male, and they mate.
She has to do that one time to produce all the egg cases that she’ll ever make, and she makes about six or seven of them. This is important. Moths do this and they’re going to mate. Many insects have to just mate one time, produce all the eggs they’ll ever mate, they’ll ever need. So, once a female becomes that adult, she goes through six or seven, what we call reproductive cycle, and then she dies of old age. Well, reproductive cycle is just this.
She… you’ve seen a German cockroach female with a ootheca protruding out of her rear end. We call that gravid. When she’s gravid, when she’s that way, she’s pregnant. Well, she’s pregnant for about a month like that. We call that a gravid female over here. And then she hatches at a case, there’s 35 to 45 first instar babies that come out. And then that’s about a third of her body weight. And then it’s not. Then the baby’s run away, and then she’s free now.
She’s been released, and she’s starting the next reproductive cycle. And it’s during that 10-day period right there. that there’s worked a really cool study done at Purdue years ago, that showed that during that 10-day period, that’s when she eats most of her food and drinks most of her water, and does most of her movement. Because if she’s eating that much food and drinking that much water, she’s got to move a lot more.
During that 27-day period over here when she is, When she’s gravid, she goes back in a hollow leg of a stool somewhere and literally just sits there. She just sits there and waits it out. She waits for a month because it’s all about the baby cockroaches. She doesn’t eat anything, she doesn’t drink anything, and she doesn’t move. She goes back in her little harborage and she sits back there and doesn’t do anything.
Reaching the Gravid Female
So I guess one of the points I’m trying to make here is if you’re not getting your aerosols in screw holes and popping tops and getting aerosols down in there or baiting, getting baits into cracks in crevices, you’re not reaching this female population. and Biologically, if you’re going to limit a population of animals, you can kill all the males you want, but that’s not going to impact a population of insects where the female only has to mate one time.
So in order to actually impact the population of insects, you have to go after the female population. And I use a hunting analogy, I hunt. And, you know, in Georgia, DNR thinks we’re overpopulated with deer. So you can take 12 does a year. You only kill two bucks, but you can take 12 does because you want to reduce the population of an animal. You have to reduce the female population. So this is what she does. She does this six or seven times and she dies.
So if you do the math, she’s basically pregnant for about 75% of her adult life. And she’s much less killable during that time. So I’m not going to show you the gory numbers here, but the females are less active. They spend more time in the harborage. It’s like 90% of their time they spent harboring. They visit resource sites less often, meaning food and water, and they consume, when they get there, they consume fewer resources.
Crack and Crevice, and the Flashlight Test
So, the key here, of course, is, as always, this has always been true, we’ve been doing this. You’ve been doing this a year, you’ve been doing this 40 years, you know that you’ve got to inspect thoroughly and you’ve got to treat cracks and crevices. That terminology, crack and crevice pest control, was coined by a company called Whitmire years and years ago. Dan Stout, a guy named Dan Stout coined that term. I think it was Dan Stout coined that term years and years ago.
And the whole Whitmire… Micro-Gen, it was Whitmire, the back end of Whitmire Micro-Gen, their whole series of products was based on crack and crevice pest control. Everything from their aerosols to their, when baits finally came along, everything was based on putting it back in a crack and crevice where the cockroaches live. Anyway, I think I’m… It’s about four o’clock. So yeah, this is, this holds true. You know, if you’re not getting on your back and looking behind things with a flashlight, you’re not doing it right.
Okay, Richie, I think I’m gonna stop there.
Transcript processed for UGA Center for Urban Agriculture / GTBOP Archives
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