Welcome to brain Stuff production of iHeart Radio. Hey brain Stuff. Lauren Vogelbam here with great news. Cockroaches are quickly becoming resistant to several different insecticides all at the same time. Cool cool, cool one. Michael Scharf, a professor in the Department of Entomology at Purdue University, along with his team found that these pests are developing cross resistance to multiple classes of exterminators insecticides. The team's work was published in
the June twenty nineteen issue of Scientific Reports. The problem is that each class of insecticides works differently to kill these critters, so exterminators frequently mix them or switch them up to combat infestations. Cockroaches are resistant to multiple insecticides, well, you can see where this is going. Scharf and his team used apartment buildings in Indiana and Illinois that had
infestations of German cockroaches as their experimental grounds. First, because tomor g is very glamorous, they caught some of the roaches and tested them to see which insecticides had the lowest resistance on the roaches. Low resistance means the roaches would be more vulnerable to the treatments which the scientists went on to use for six months. Scharf said in a press release, if you have the ability to test the roaches first and pick an insecticide that has a
low resistance, that ups the odds. But even then we had trouble controlling populations. The researchers rotated three different insecticides. That method kept the roach population stable over six months, meaning it neither increased nor decreased. When they mixed two insecticides, the roach population flourished, according to the press release, flourished being just about the last verb anyone wants to hear
when talking about cockroaches. When the team used just one insecticide for the entire six months and the roaches had low resistance to that particular insecticide, they were nearly wiped out. Well, great, right, Not really, because if even ten percent of the roaches had resistance to that insecticide, the population would increase, Scharf said, quote four to sixfold in just one generation. We didn't have a clue that something like that could happen this fast.
During this test, the roaches also developed resistance to several other kinds of insecticides, even if the new generations had never been exposed to them before. So now what Scharf said. He recommends combating roaches with more than chemical warfare, including traps and vacuums. Quote. Some of these methods are more expensive than using only insecticides, but if those insecticides aren't going to control or eliminate a population, you're just throwing
money away. Oh and hey, you've probably heard that roaches can survive a nuclear blast, and the terrible news is that that appears to be true. Remember the show MythBusters. Their team set up an experiment that exposed German cockroaches to different levels of radiation. One group was exposed level similar to those omitted by the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. For a month, ten thousand rads, ten percent of the group was still alive. Maybe we should just go ahead
and bow to our cockroach overlords now. Today's episode was written by Kristen hall Geisler and produced by Tyler Clay. Brain Stuff is production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more in this and lots of other staunch topics, visit our home planet how stuff Works dot com and for more podcasts of my heart Radio as thy heart Radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,