This American Roach

Hello, friends. We're doing something new and fun. A show, not just for your ears, but also for your eyes and your skin. And your tongue. Yeah. Watch if that sounds a little weird. What we are doing is a live show where we give the full radio lab treatment to other senses, not just hearing, but now taste. We're taking the stage as part of the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City, one night only, June ninth, to explore.

Pleasure. You're gonna be literally tasting things and feeling things that hopefully you have never tasted or felt before. And with the help of friends, musicians, science writers, foodies, we're gonna try to blow out your senses, to give you a new understanding of how you taste and feel this world. We would love if you join us, make us your Tuesday night date, uh, June ninth at six PM in Tribeca.

Love that it's Tuesday night, like we're we're not a we're not asking for a Not a Friday night date. But Tuesday night, you know, you can spare one of them. I love a Tuesday night. You can buy your tickets at tribecafilm.com slash audio. That's tribecahfilm.com slash audio. And uh we're gonna give you a little discount code, so get your pen or your notes app ready. Uh that's E F twenty six Radio Lab. That's it. Join us. To see you there. Woo! Oh y wait, you're listening. Last. Radio From W N Y.

Okay, so do do do do do do I have to tell you a story. I'm Latv Nasser, this is Radio Lab, and I'm sitting with reporter Alex Nietzsche. So my birthday is in August and a couple summers ago Here in New York, we were in the middle of this very hot, very sticky heat wave. Okay. And I had like a nice day, didn't do too much. I think I went to my community garden. I remember spending some time there. There's a park near where I live that I like to go to. And so I'd been outside all day.

and needed to take a shower. Okay. And I was getting out of the shower in this like cloud of steam drying off. Putting like moisturizer on my face, and I went to leave the bathroom barefoot. to go into my bedroom, which is right next door. Get dressed. Okay. And I lifted my foot to take a step into the hallway. But right before it touched the floor, I felt these thready little legs on the bottom of my foot, and I looked down, and there on its back was a gigantic rope.

Wait, what? I I thought you were gonna say like a like a serial killer. You mean like a like a roach like a cockroach? An American cockroach, yeah. And this was like a big one. Um And it was on its back, like it was dying? Yeah, but with roaches, you just never know. Like it could look dead but be just alive enough that it's gonna flip back over and run up my leg. And with my foot hovering over this bug. I'm flooded with revulsion, but also terror. Like this bug has gotta go now.

And so I got back in the shower, scrubbed my foot, wrapped myself in a towel, ran to go find my cat, put her next to the roach, take a few steps back. And I wait. And she's looking at the roach and looking at me. And I'm like, do something. But she just walks away. So then I'm like, Pull yourself together, like Uh I have to square up against the roja. The dying or dead roach.

Right. Okay. So I put on yellow rubber gloves and then I get a wad of paper towels, saturated in water, grab toilet bowl cleaner, you know, like the blue gel. Okay. squirt a bunch of it into the paper towel and from like three feet away toss it so that it lands geled down on top of the roach. And then I take a shoe and holding it like as far away from my body as I can get it. I'm just like WAP WAP WAP WAP WAP WAP! WAP! WAP! WAP! WAP! วะวะวะวะวะ

What? Mm-hmm. Yeah. And then I get a trash bag, scoop it up, and stick it in there, and then tie it up super tight. Wow. Then it goes into the trash chute. And standing there in rubber gloves next to the trash chute on my birthday, I'm just like What is wrong with me? Like this is not the first time that this has happened. Every single time I see a roach, I completely unravel. Like I just go nuts. And I don't even hate bugs in general. It's just something about this bug.

I don't know, like I just snap. And for some reason, when it happened this time, I was like, I'm a whole adult person. I'm a science reporter. This has to stop.

Okay, so is what is what we're doing here. Like it's like how Alex Learn to stop worrying and love the roach. Uh not really. Um, I'm not really trying to get cozy with roaches. I just want to figure out how to get to a place where I'm not terrified of them. And obviously I know this is something that a lot of people are afraid of. And I wanted to figure out, you know, is there something I can do so that the next time I see one, I don't completely lose my mind.

So I figured I'd go hang out with people who face basically the worst version of this every single day. Okay. Which is how I ended up at the after party. finest expos in in New York, probably in the nation. Or the New York City Pest Expo. uh top-notch pest control companies and exterminators from all over. There was like a roach ball? Yeah, it's like the social part. Like there's food, there's drinks, there was a DJ, like there's music. And also Oh yeah, I've seen roaches drop off the ceiling.

A ton of people who have been in straight up nightmare scenarios. I've knocked on doors and seen them running up and down the door. Roaches were in everything from the record player to the TV to the bedhead. This place was literally, I'm I'm telling Stephen King levels of roaches. And yet no fear. Well, we had to take care of the situation. Insects do you do you have at home? This is Lou Sorkin, an entomologist and pest control consultant. Oh three cockroach species. Millipedes.

And right next to him, he had this huge plastic tub of cockroaches. This is a Madagascar hissing cockroach. Oh yes. I d the Madagascar ones are huge, right? Yeah. Like some of the biggest roaches um in the world. And at one point, Lou just picked one up with his bare hands. They're tasting, you can see the palps come from the mouth down and touch my skin.

I think I might have nightmares tonight. We'll see. And I was like, how are these people like that? Hi. Nice to you. And could I get like that? Well let's go. Let's take a stroll.

So I found some exterminators who agreed to let me follow them around. One named Lakeisha Fulcher. Um here we have eleven buildings or sixteen stories. She works at a public housing complex on the Lower East Side. I'm happy. Give me five days. Let's go. And also a guy named Cedric Simmons. He has his own company. So right now we're headed to North Bronx uh to a residential unit that has been having some issues with German roaches. And they just started showing me the rope.

Sparflight is the most essential. We went into basements and trash rooms. The scatter. They're going to places like this. They showed me how to find signs that roaches were living there. Even when they're Looking for marks like this, what look like pen tapping? It'll look like pepper, like stuck pepper on a wall. It's roach droppings. And of course, how to kill them. Oh yeah.

Cedric takes me inside this house, and the first thing he does is take a look around the closet with his flashlight, and you can see the roaches perched up on the wall. Oh, there's two more. Yeah. And then he goes to the kitchen sink and he pulls out this jug and it's this chemical, you know, it's basically industrial strength raid. Yeah, it is pretty strong. It has a it has a pretty good knockdown too. Knockdown meaning how quick uh it reduces the population.

The kind of stuff you need a license to buy. Like you can't get this at Home Depot. So what does this actually do to them? So it attacks their nervous system and it disrupts it and it makes them basically just incapable and then it succumbs them. Is it painful for them? I don't know I don't know At some point, he pointed out a pregnant roach. That one back there has its egg sack about to come out. Gracias por ver el video. Yeah, in the corner. Is that that little like That's protruding up.

Yeah, that's it. Oh man. And then he started spraying them. And after about 10 minutes, they made their last twitches. Alright guys, definitely dead. How did you feel about that? Like did you feel bad? Um sort of. Wow. The sack is coming out. I was like, that sucks. For a second. Yeah. And then it's like I didn't think about it for the rest of the day. Honestly, what I really felt were these little glimmers of confidence. Like you weren't afraid.

Well, it's not that I wasn't afraid, but it was like my fear had shrunk just enough that I was starting to feel kind of bold, like maybe I could kill these things too. So we here we have roach activity and loading activity. Yep. And then also that's the the Okay, we saw one. I didn't freak out. Like Cedric took me to Grand Central Station. fifty six trade up properly.

And let's let's let's go for it. I was seeing fat roaches and acting like it was no big deal. Ooh, big one. Okay. I didn't like it. It's so tall. But it was nothing like before. So I can step on them or I can spray them. Mm-hmm. No, I make bias. Maybe. Where we do that. Right. Wow.

I was just sitting around my apartment. A friend was over, we were watching TV. Okay. And I went to the kitchen for a glass of water. And I saw something slightly moved. In the sink. So I looked inside And they saw antenna. And I was like, Nope. Walked straight out of the kitchen, got my friend, told him he needs to come deal with it, and then I stood behind him and squealed while I watched him kill. Wait, what happened to all your training?

I don't know. I just couldn't do it. What? I mean, first of all, Lakeisha and Cedric nowhere to be found. Right. And second of all, I was seeing this roach in my house, in my sink. where I had just washed blueberries that morning. And I think it triggered some kind of survival instinct. And I just don't think any amount of pest control knowledge was gonna override that. Yeah. Basically I was just like, okay, well

That didn't work. Back to square one. You know, I gotta start over. And one day I was just Googling around and I stumbled across this guy. Hey guys, I'm Chef Joseph Yoon, edible insect ambassador at Brooklyn Bugs, and we're gonna show you how to eat all these bugs. Yeah yeah yeah I've I s I've seen this YouTube video of him doing like different dishes with bugs. Yeah, like gourmet dishes. The beautiful notes of cricket, umami, and nuttiness, this Oh wait, but you're not gonna be able to do it.

Well, I just thought if anyone could help me get over that revulsion I feel towards these bugs. Scorpion literally adds so much Labor. Maybe it's this guy. Like if I could just eat a roach, maybe it wouldn't be nasty anymore. It would just be a little snack. Okay. Right. I sent him an email and I was like, do you ever cook with roaches? And he wrote back to me and was like, absolutely not. I'm already try having to do a lot of work to convince people that they should eat other bugs.

Roaches have such a bad reputation. Like roaches don't help my cause basically. So I went back and forth with him being like, You're the only person I can possibly think of who could make me like eating a roach. Yeah. And then finally You bullied him into doing it. He like I I fear I might have. I fear. I might have.

감사합니다. Yeah. Bye. Okay, so what happened? Let's do it. Right. So me and eight of our colleagues Joseph had like very, very generously invited us to his home in Queens. We're we're all gonna try something really kind of unusual and and weird. So obviously, all of us are really nervous, including Joseph, because he's never actually eaten an American cockroach before. So we started with his usual dishes, crickets, ants, mealworms.

This is This is the uh brewed 19 cicadas and it has a Cricut uh tempura batter on it. Okay, so this is just a warm-up. Yeah, yeah. Delicious. It's good. And the whole time I'm looking over at the bowl of cockroaches on the counter out of the side of my eye. And by the way, they weren't like random roaches. These were food safe from a Okay, good to know. Honestly, let's have I was kind of in denial that any of this was about to happen. They're they're quite frightening.

Okay. Maybe I'll pull the legs off of them. First up, do be your roaches. Uh there might be innards that squirt in your mouth. Right. Fried. Ich mein, ich mein Trauer. Something poked the inside of my It's a leg? You think it's a leg? I loved it, I don't know what it was, but I hated it. You're doing really good. Next, Madagascar hissing cockroaches. And commitment. And he had blanched these and done nothing else. dress a cop crush but still a cop crush.

He put them on a cutting board and sliced them so we could slurp the insides out like an oyster. It looks like cottage cheese. But this one was not that bad. has like a really umami smell. Much better. It was like eggs. And then finally my arch nemesis. The American cockroach. grabs some kind of cooking oil, throws it in a pan, and adds all these aromatics like garlic, red pepper, and then he throws in the roaches. Kinda weird.

Yeah. Fall because no matter how long he was like sauteing these freaking roaches with all these aromatics, it just smelled off. Uh But Joseph still grabbed a spoon. I think someone has to do it. Um And the look on his face made me feel really guilty. I mean I I I almost spit out what I aimed. Terrestrial's producer Alan Gafinsky also tried it. Nervous. Oh yeah, there it is.

Well uh initially it just kind of uh just was tasting sort of the garlic, like an onion, but That's that smell that you guys have been smelling is It's also a taste. It tastes like something that you shouldn't eat. Yeah. Yeah. What is the rochi smell smell like? Kind of like Medicinal, but in like a foul, sour kind of way. So you did not eat it. No, like according to a bugs ass food expert. The American cockroach is literally inedible.

It's a warning sign to me. It it's like kind of like don't eat me. I dare you to eat me, I'll kill you. Man, this is really not going well. Yeah, no the whole thing completely backfired. Yeah. So we're gonna take a quick break. Yeah. Cleanse our palate. Yeah. After the break, things are gonna get even messier. We'll be right back. Yeah. Radio Lab is sponsored by BetterHelp. What do you think when you hear the word summer? Do you think heat? Do you think so?

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I'm Latdev Nasser. This is Radio Lab back with reporter Alex Neeson, who has just faced her deep seated fear of the roach in a number of unspeakable ways. Yes. But it backfired and she only managed to surface her maybe even more deep seated disgust for them. Yeah, I didn't want them in my life, in my city, in my state, sure anywhere. On planet Earth. Yeah. I just hate them. Yeah. Sort of amidst all of this I came across this book called Pests How Humans Create Animal Villains by Science Writer.

Can I cuss on this program? Yes. This squirrel is known as fucking Kevin. And this book it was just on the front table at my neighborhood bookstore, but it turned out to be exactly what I needed because while the animal Bethany hates is a scorpion. And he lives in the maple tree in front of my own. Particularly the ones that she named Kevin who were eating all of her tomatoes. So this is like personal.

Yes, I really did contemplate a BB gun. Wow. But Kevin is one of the creatures that led me to this deep question. What? Is it that makes us hate animals? Yeah. I could sort of feel it elevating me out of my murder, murder, murder, kill, kill, kill. Lizard brain to this idea that I could really get behind.

Has succeeded really well at living near us, we hate them. If we can't take it in, tame it, and put it in a little doggy sweater, we That word pest takes an animal that is like a living, breathing creature that lives here on this planet with us and turns it into. We're saying that that animal is a little bit more than a little bit. No value. what to do to get rid of that animal is worthwhile. Which is exactly how I feel about roaches.

And she sort of proposes that we should do away with the category of pest altogether. Mm-hmm. Wait, that's fascinating. Um and you know, the wheels in my head just like start spinning and I just kept thinking, like, huh, this is how I wanna be in the world, what I want my politic to be. Like I'm gonna make a t shirt says abolish pests and let people ask me about it. Like I'm down. And I really want to not hate the rope. Yes. But how?

Well, so a lot of the way we respond to animals and the anger we feel and the frustration arises out of our own ignorance. Sounds like you need to I know. I I think it's time to learn about these revolting, repulsive, nauseating, offensive, terrible animals.

Okay. So let's chat a little bit about the discussed response. So I called up entomologist Sammy Ramsey, professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. Okay, I needed you to see what is happening on this tree. Because this guy look at this. Really? What is this? Bug loves bugs. How cute is this boy? He even has a YouTube channel where he sometimes sings to bugs. Okay, he likes bugs.

Love it. And so I thought if anyone could help me abolish the pest in my heart, it would be Sammy. All right, Alex. Listeners, y'all ready for Dr. Sammy story time? Yes. Doctor Sammy's story time. All right, y'all. We gotta get some theme music for that at some point, but anyway. Um And maybe it's just because Sammy is really charming, but talking to him, I couldn't help but feel my hatred of the roach. Cockroaches are survivors.

I learned that they're at least as old as the dinosaurs as a species. They can go for ridiculous amounts of time without food, you can cut off a cockroach's head and it can survive for more than a week. They can run like three miles an hour. They're basically the cheetah of the insect world. They are very resistant to nuclear radiation. They can eat paper, just paper.

It's some of these survival techniques, like their tendency to run away from light and their ability to flatten their bodies and squeeze into even. Like we step on a cockroach. And then ever so slowly lift our foot. And it runs away. And we're just like, what how what sort of sorcery did you just do? So I was listening to all this stuff Sammy was telling me. It was almost like I could feel the roach begin to transform into something more than just a pest.

So they've sort of evolved to protect themselves in this way from us, the predator. Um and like other predators, I guess. Like these organisms are absolutely incredible. And had they not But then he told me that as much as I didn't want cockroaches around

Cockroaches, they don't want to be here. They didn't want to be around either. Huh. What does that mean? Well apparently the name Paraplanita Americana, the American cockroach. But in order to really tell its story, I need to take you back hundreds of years when colonists. showed up on the west coast of Africa, they corralled a bunch of human beings onto these ships. They stacked them like furniture.

And gave them no opportunities to behave like humans, to go to the restroom. The cleanliness standards on those ships were pretty low. And there were also some hitchhikers on those ships. See, the American cockroach is actually from Africa. And they climbed aboard those ships that had a bunch of unprotected food in various places, and they found the slats of wood between the ships to be great spaces for them to wedge their bodies. And when they got to the US, they set up a whole new power.

So they got here on slave ships. He tells me this in this conversation, and I it just like it felt like Damn. Okay. Um why like why would you let's start this whole conversation over and just like can we just not? It was just sort of like Uh like I can't even just hate a bug without the shadow of slavery. Um Like I just wanted to hate this bug and see if I can not hate it. And then it's like now this. 嗯 I mean, can you like what was inside of that moment for you?

I talked to a bunch of people about this. You asking me if I feel kinship to these roast cheese? Nope, absolutely not. And one of them was author and my friend Angela Florinoy. Obviously the metaphors abound. Because there's like this thing that I think everyone's gonna do, which is be like, Oh, great.

Shared history. You guys survived something together. And so, you know, you should feel some special connection to this insect. Right. That just sort of walks itself into into the room. It does. And I'm like, absolutely not. That story just plays straight, like directly into Like all the old, just the oldest and most boring racist.

story that's been told about black people in this country. I mean, Roach is an old anti-black slur, and because of racism, black people were forced into poor housing conditions and so sometimes had to live in closer proximity to the Roach.

And of course I knew all that, but to see that that line of history actually started with a roach on a slave ship is just like That is um Yeah, it just feels like it's just like, damn, like I told Cedric Simmons, the exterminator. you know, a lot of people won't treat it with a ki with caring hands. And he spoke to this fear of mine. I think they'll weaponize it, you know.

Should I suppress this? Like everything winds up in the wrong hands. And it's like Oh those people they're they probably already know, you know. It's like a zoom. FCBT is probably telling people this information. You know, we live in a dystopia. But still, does putting this in my story? Like, could it deepen this racist idea? Like, does it give legitimacy to the idea that some people have that black people and roaches go together? I think that It's really it's legitimate the feelings of

I've tried since I knew I was gonna come and talk to you about cockroaches, which I who I also, you know, I really don't like them. And I I um I've been thinking about some of the origins of my dislike and when I was growing up my mom was really like we would go over certain relatives house or whatever and she would like make us shake everything out on our porch before we came inside the house. Mm-hmm. She was very Over the top like vigilant about roaches and assumptions about like cleanliness.

And some of that had to do with this idea of like shame and like socioeconomic shame and it's this says something about us. Like we might not have all the money, et cetera, but we're And one evidence of that is like We don't have roaches. Yeah. The honest thing is that like when I tell a stranger a story on the record about a roach in my home, like there is something, however small in my chest that's a little bit like damn. Now they know.

Well, you have to free yourself, though. You have to free th yourself in that shame. Yeah. You have to free yourself of the burden of Like Skyroach ain't got nothing to do with you. Yeah. I think of roaches in the same way that I think of roaches. Again, Bethany Brookshire. These are animals that are succeeding because our social contract has failed. Right. The Roach arrived in America and succeeded because of a massive failure of a social contract that we called enslavement.

Right. And they continue to succeed where social contracts fail, where racism thrives, you know, where people end up underserved and kind of forced into histories. leave them in a state of poverty and lack of opportunity. Right. And so you could see them not so much as a parallel story, so much as a symbol of the failed social contract that kind of got us here.

My goal here is to regard the roach as a roach, and in so many ways the roach is not just a roach. a stand-in for like class and race and like all of these things that are like way more consequential than just like a bug being a bug, you know. And all this got me thinking about another roach fact. I can talk about bugs for the So Sammy told me about which is that roaches are only dirty because they live in our sewer systems, which are filthy.

And just like in New York, the way we dispose of trash, what do we do with it? We stick it out on the street all night, and then the roaches crawl all over it and pick up germs and stuff. And these roaches, as gross as they can be sometimes, are constant cleaners. They're actually naturally very clean animals, cleaning their antenna almost the way that cats clean their whiskers. Making sure that they are getting rid of all the bits of foreign matter that could uh accumulate bacteria or fungus.

They spend a lot of time trying to clean themselves of filth that they picked up from us. And it made me wonder: if you take away all the different layers of human filth that we've placed on the road. What's left? What is that animal? Huh? Yeah, w and where I'm curious, I wanna hear more about like how how they live on the continent that they are native. Yeah, so like they live basically anywhere that there's vegetation. So jungle, forest And they eat primarily.

Organic matter, leaves, decomposing trees, logs. They're decomposers, so they also eat like the bodies of dead animals and plants. Yeah, yeah. And actually I thought I would end this story. By taking you there. To the place they came from. We're deep in a tropical rainforest in the Congo Basin. Huge trees, capocs and mahoganies, tower hundreds of feet overhead. Their canopies filled with monkeys and parrots and eagles. The air is thick and humid. And on the ground.

Scurrying along the edge of a rotten log. Is a female? Cockroach. And this one A mother is At the base of her abdomen is a reddish capsule. Inside it are sixteen eggs. She carries them and incubates them. of protective casing, dragging it along like a wagon. She carries on, gliding effortlessly across the jagged debris that covers the forest floor. comes across a small hole. Soft, muddy soil. She pauses, looking both ways, making sure the coast is clear.

Before dropping the She stares down at her children. Or maybe pass them. One by one, she oscillates her antennae up towards the sky and back down again. And considered as if reciting a prayer. And then She scurries away. A month passes. The eggs inside become Tiny translucent larvae. Yeah. The larvae have no lungs, so they breathe through ten little holes along the sides of their bellies. They're getting hungry. And thirsty.

And one day, as if responding in perfect time to an invisible conductor, all 16 babies flex the muscles in their abdomens and in unison take a giant collective breath. Their slender bodies swell with air. Growing And growing And growing Until the Uthika pops. Cutting the last tie to their mother that they've got. And together we They scatter. Some towards the river. to come towards a wall of underbrush. Sum up the first time. with trunks of hundred year old trees. Out into the forest.

to make Their lives. This episode was reported by Alex Neeson and produced by Jessica Young and Annie McEwen. It was edited by Pat Walters and fact checked by Sophie Sami. Special thanks to Jessica Ware, Timothy Marzulo, and Alexandra Bell. That's it for us. Thanks for listening. Hi, I'm Gabby. I'm from the Bay Area, California, and here are the staff credits. Radiolab is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser.

Soran Wheeler is our executive editor, Sarah Sandbach is our executive director, our managing editor is Pat Walters, Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Jeremy Bloom, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Nina Sambandan, Matt Kilti, Mona Modgauker, Alex Nissen, Sara Kari, Natalia Ramirez, Red And Anisa Vizza, Arian Wack, Molly Webster, and Jessica Young, with help from Gabby Santos.

Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Natalie Middleton, Angie Mercado, and Sophie Semmers. Hi, I'm Aubrey, calling from Salt Lake City, Utah. Leadership support for Radio Lab Science Programming is provided by the Science. And the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radio Lab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

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