What Do Cockroaches Eat? Understanding Cockroach Feeding Habits in One Article

Cockroaches are one of the oldest insects on this planet, originating alongside other insects in the Devonian period. They are scavengers that prefer to hide by day and come out at night, living inside burrows. They can withstand both extreme heat and severe cold, and to this day they remain quite widely distributed. Over hundreds of millions of years their appearance has not changed much, yet their vitality and adaptability have become ever more tenacious. Let us take a look below at what cockroaches eat!

What do cockroaches eat?

Cockroaches are omnivorous insects with an extremely wide range of foods. All kinds of food items, including bread, rice, pastries, cooked meat and vegetarian dishes, melons and fruit, and beverages, and so on, especially favor fragrant, sweet, oily flour-based foods. They have a habit of craving oils and fats, and among sugars, brown sugar and maltose have the strongest attraction for them. Besides favoring all kinds of food, 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 goods, 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 some extent in their feeding habits.

How long can a cockroach live?

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 likewise varies according to 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, the American cockroach and others, takes more than 1 year. The length of the life history varies not only by species but also according to different conditions such as temperature and nutrition. A single fertilized female cockroach also produces many egg cases over her lifetime; the American cockroach can produce more than 50, so cockroaches have very strong reproductive capacity.

Why is the cockroach called "Xiaoqiang"?

1. Cockroaches have a history of hundreds of millions of years, while humans have only a few million years.

2. There are more than 3,700 species of cockroaches. Omnivorous? NO! They will eat almost anything as long as it is organic matter.

3. Cockroaches can survive for at least 10 minutes in a vacuum (not an absolute vacuum, such as in space).

4. Cockroaches can live under 40 kilowatts of X-rays, while humans? Please count in seconds. Cockroaches will die under X-rays of 10,000 electron volts provided by a synchrotron, which is 1,000 times the intensity of the former.

5. Cockroaches can live for 30 seconds in 12-molar hydrochloric acid and 18-molar sodium hydroxide.

6. Cockroaches can live for at least 30 minutes underwater.

7. Cockroaches can live for a long time inside a 100-degree oven.

8. To kill a cockroach with a traditional weapon, that is, a slipper, requires 29.4 newtons.

9. The speed at which cockroaches crawl is slightly slower than a human running, but this does not include the speed at which they crawl on vertical walls. In water, cockroaches move as if on flat ground, and cockroaches even have wings and can fly.

10. After a cockroach's head is cut off, the body and the head can still each live for 9 days, and the cause of death is excessive hunger.

11. A biologist once reached a conclusion based on the ecological habits of cockroaches: if one day a global nuclear war broke out on Earth, all living things within the affected area, including humans and even fish, would be wiped out, and only cockroaches would continue their lives. This is because under normal circumstances the amount of radiation the human body can tolerate is 5 rems (a unit of radiation dose), and once the total radiation dose exceeds 800 rems, death is certain. The German cockroach, however, can tolerate 9,000 to 105,000 rems, and the American cockroach reaches 967,500 rems! So even if there is a nuclear explosion, cockroaches can survive.