Cockroach Block Party
I find out where those all those squashed cockroaches come from
I’m not sure how quick you are, but I am not usually light-footed enough to step on a cockroach when I’m trying to. I might get the cockroach in the end as it darts back and forth on the kitchen floor (to be clear, we don’t live in a real life Joe’s Apartment; we have only occasional cockroaches on the kitchen floor), but I find I’m faster and more lethal with a magazine than my feet. Thus I have been perplexed for some time about the dead cockroaches we see on the sidewalk on our block in the morning. I had assumed that they were poison-addled bugs put out of their misery by passing pedestrians, which might still be true to some degree, but recently I learned there is another source of squashed bugs.
I generally don’t come home well after dark on sultry summer nights. For starters I simply don’t stay up late, and as middle-aged parents with jobs to get up for in the morning, we don’t tend to linger on the rare occasions we do get out.
But on a few late nights this summer I found myself returning from firefly surveys at the Great Marsh, parking the car wherever I could find a spot within a quarter mile of our house, and then walking the same stretches of sidewalk I cruise in the morning.
The humans on the block were mostly quiet, but the cockroaches were apparently having a block party. It was genuinely difficult to avoid stepping on them as they zipped back and forth under my shoes
.
We’ve got two common species of cockroaches in our neck of the woods. Oriental cockroaches (Blatta orientalis) and American (Periplaneta* americana, actually imports from Africa and the Middle East.) cockroaches. The the latter are tan with long limbs, while the former are darker and less leggy. In retrospect, I should have checked which species was tripping the light fantastic around my feet. At least one was an Oriental cockroach (see the photo above). Next time I’ll do better.
In any case, where did they all come from? Sure, I know that we tend to underestimate our cockroach neighbors. If I see one on the kitchen floor, there are at least 10 I don’t see. But still, the numbers on the sidewalk implied I was off by at least another order of magnitude. Could it be that our neighbors have been dealing with major infestations even while we have not?
I don’t think so.
The key to remember is that there is another layer below the urban landscape that we occupy, and it is the domain of creatures that love the dim and damp, and that thrive on what we cast off and flush down the drains. The sewers (which in Philadelphia connect to the storm sewers) run under our street, like they run under every other street, and they are full of rats and cockroaches thriving on the nutrients (kitchen waste, but certainly poop as well) we send them. I suspect that hot, humid nights entice the cockroaches to emerge from the storm sewers and the vertical trap pipes (these allow access to the sewage connection lines without having to rip up the pavement) that run from sidewalk down to sewer lines in front of houses on our block.
Like a sultry Halloween, those hot, humid nights dissolve the boundary between the underworld and ours, reminding us that the seemingly solid ground beneath our feet is a world unto itself.
* “Periplaneta” How’s that for a genus name? They might have originated in one place, but now they are truly worldwide.