What are the characteristics of cockroaches' living habits?
Cockroaches like to choose warm, humid places with abundant food and many crevices to live in. These are the 4 basic conditions needed for breeding. Any building where people live and reside generally has these conditions, so cockroaches have become sanitary pests that infest thousands of households. Let's take a look below at the living habits of cockroaches!
Cockroaches prefer darkness and fear light, hiding by day and coming out at night, and this is also an important habit of cockroaches. During the day they hide in dark, light-shaded places, such as indoor furniture, cracks in walls, caves, corners, and piles of clutter. Only at night, especially after the lights are turned off and people are asleep, do they come out to move about, either looking for food or seeking a mate. Therefore, out of 24 hours in a day, about 75% of the time is spent in a resting state.
Cockroaches are omnivorous insects with an extremely wide range of food types. All kinds of foods include bread, rice, pastries, cooked meat and vegetable dishes, melons and fruits, and beverages, among others. They especially like to eat fragrant, sweet, oily flour-based foods, and have a habit of craving fats and oils. Among sugars, brown sugar and maltose have the strongest attraction for them. Besides liking all kinds of foods, cockroaches also often bite and eat other items. For example, in residences, warehouses, storage rooms, and other places, they can gnaw on cotton and wool products, leather products, paper, books, soap, and so on. Outdoors in garbage piles, sewers, toilets, and other places, they feed on decaying organic matter, and even gnaw on dead animals. However, different species of cockroaches also differ to a certain extent in their feeding habits.
Adult cockroaches also have relatively long lifespans. The German cockroach has the shortest at about 100 days, while the longest-lived American cockroach can survive for as long as 1 year. Lifespan also varies with species and environmental conditions. Taking the German cockroach, which has the shortest cycle, as an example, it generally takes more than 2 months to complete one generation, while the longest, such as the American cockroach, takes more than 1 year. The length of the life history varies not only by species, but also by different conditions such as temperature and nutrition. A single fertilized female cockroach also produces many egg cases in her lifetime; the American cockroach can produce more than 50, so cockroaches have very strong reproductive capacity.
Cockroach reproduction is a combination of sexual reproduction and asexual reproduction. A mature female cockroach can produce one egg case containing 14 to 40 eggs every 7 to 10 days. The egg case is a gelatinous body and hatches between 20 and 37°C. The higher the temperature, the shorter the hatching time. At a constant temperature of 30°C, it takes only 20 to 30 days, while at longer durations it can exceed three months. One female cockroach can reproduce nearly ten thousand offspring in a year, and at most up to one hundred thousand. Under extreme conditions, when there are no male cockroaches, female cockroaches can also lay eggs. That is to say, after many female cockroaches mate once, they become hermaphroditic and can continue laying eggs without mating.
Cockroaches have the habit of living in groups. It can often be found that at one resting point, there are always at least a few, or as many as dozens or hundreds, gathered together. This is mainly due to the attracting effect of pheromones. Both adult and nymph cockroaches can secrete a kind of “aggregation pheromone,” which is secreted by the rectal pads and can be excreted with feces. In places where cockroaches live, brown fecal trace spots formed by their feces can often be seen. The more fecal traces there are, the more cockroaches gather.