This sounds, in theory, like “it should have been great for humans,” says Justa Heinen-Kay, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Minnesota. Read: This cyborg cockroach could save your life someday “She learns that the courtship process is not good because of the bitter taste,” Wada-Katsumata said. Weeks may pass before the female is ready to couple anew, if she ever becomes interested in trying again. Within a couple of seconds, though, the taste turns foul-prompting her to skedaddle, her eggs still unfertilized. “So at first she is interested,” Wada-Katsumata told me. It’s chock-full of maltose, a type of sugar the female’s saliva rapidly converts to glucose. If tasty enough, the nuptial gift could coax lady roaches into sitting down for an extended snack-five, six, seven seconds, perhaps longer-enough time for her suitor to initiate an hour-plus-long mating embrace, at the end of which he would deliver a package of sperm.īut the male’s precoital treat holds no appeal for sugar-loathing females. Chemically speaking, the secretion is “similar to chocolate,” with comparable allure, Wada-Katsumata told me. Prior to Sugargate, the insects had a standard courtship protocol: Males extruded a fatty, sugary “nuptial gift” from a gland on their back to tempt prospective mates into a tryst. The Atkins-esque diet has taken a toll on German cockroaches’ sex lives too. But their experiments in the lab do show that when baits are scarce and sugary foods flow free, the mutant cockroaches get rapidly outcompeted by their glucose-loving cousins. Wada-Katsumata and Schal haven’t done much work in doughnut shops. Starved of low-carb options, the mutant roaches might struggle to eat enough. “Imagine an infestation in a Dunkin’ Donuts,” Schal told me. That’s likely a problem for bugs in the sugar-addicted Western world, Schal said, because they “eat whatever we eat”-candy, pastries, and packaged snacks galore. But anything that contains a pure infusion of the simple sugar glucose, or that rapidly breaks down into it, registers to the mutant cockroaches as horrifically bitter, says Ayako Wada-Katsumata, an entomologist at North Carolina State University. Meats, nuts, and super-complex starchy foods, such as beans, still taste mostly fine. Read: Why you can’t keep cockroaches out of your homeĬockroaches’ aversion to sweetness came with costs. ![]() Faced with saccharine death, roaches adapted at warp speed, turning a liability on its head-yet another reason why they remain some of our most persistent pests. Populations of bait-snubbing cockroaches have since been discovered in other parts of the world, even as far away as Russia, each of them apparently evolving their aversion independently, Schal told me. But a few insects, born with an unusual set of genetic changes that rewired their sense of taste, were no longer attracted to the baits-and, unlike their sugar-addicted kin, lived long enough to pass their mutations on to their offspring. Lured irresistibly to sugar-laced poisons for years, most of the roaches in the apartment had died. Silverman had stumbled upon an evolutionary accident. One of the company’s researchers, Jules Silverman, plucked several roaches from a Gainesville apartment-and was flabbergasted to find that the insects were no longer tempted by Combat’s corn syrup and instead scuttled away in disgust. He’d been planting Combat all over homes for years, but suddenly, it was failing to seduce German cockroaches to their deaths. ![]() In the late 1980s, the manufacturers of Combat, a popular roach bait, received a perplexed call from a pest-control operator in Florida. And victory was sweet.īut not even a decade passed before the battlefield shifted once again. Manufacturers were sure that they had, after centuries of strife, gained a decisive upper hand. The advent of these baits “revolutionized pest control,” says Coby Schal, an entomologist at North Carolina State University. The secret was sugar: Cockroaches, like us, simply couldn’t resist their sweet tooth. Tired of chasing after the pests with noxious sprays and bombs, researchers started to infuse their poisons with delicious flavors that could compel roaches to approach of their own accord, and then feast upon their own demise. In the centuries-long war between humans and cockroaches, the most bitter blow was dealt roughly 40 years ago.
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