322 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. I4I 



planeta americana ate young bedbugs which had soft, blood-filled ab- 

 domens ; adult bedbugs with harder exoskeletons sometimes were 

 rejected. The maximum number of bedbugs eaten by a cockroach 

 was 3 out of 12 during a period of 48 hours. Johnson and Mellanby 

 (1939), also in laboratory experiments, were unable to show that bed- 

 bugs can be controlled by Blatta oricntalis or that bedbugs are eaten 

 to any extent by them. The existing evidence indicates that there is 

 little basis for the often repeated statement that cockroaches destroy 

 bedbugs in nature. As Lorando (1929) pointed out, assassin bugs, 

 cockroaches, and red ants can hardly be considered as practical factors 

 in bedbug control, though he did recommend the use of spiders. 



According to Martini (1952), cockroaches prey on mosquitoes and 

 sand flies but we have been unable to find any original sources for 

 these statements ; the only reference we have found in which cock- 

 roaches and Phlebotomus are mentioned together is a paper by Whit- 

 tingham and Rook (1923) ; they fed ground-up cockroaches to larvae 

 oi Phlebotomus papatasii. Wharton (1951) reported that cockroaches 

 and other predators attacked mosquitoes knocked down by insecticides 

 and affected the number recovered. 



Cockroaches will on occasion attack and bite animals other than in- 

 sects. In an earlier paper (1957a) we discussed about 20 reports of 

 cockroaches biting man. The injury is usually confined to abrasion 

 of the callused portions of hands and feet but may result in small 

 wounds in the softer skin of the face and neck. We failed to include 

 the following reference in the above-mentioned paper. Sonan (1924) 

 had his toes and breast nibbled by cockroaches on Hiyakejima Island 

 during sleep. He had previously learned from a policeman that Peri- 

 planeta americana and P. australasiae nibbled people on that island, 

 but he had hardly believed it before he experienced the biting himself. 



INTRASPECIES PREDATION 



Those who have reared cockroaches in the laboratory have un- 

 doubtedly seen cannibalism occur in the cultures. Cannibalism has 

 been observed among the common domiciliary species of cockroaches 

 as well as laboratory colonies of Leucophaea maderae (Scharrer, 

 1953), and Blaherus craniifer^^ (Saupe, 1928). Edmunds (1957) 



11 The West Indian "Blabera jusca Brunner" of Saupe (1928) is obviously 

 Blaberus craniifcr as can readily be seen from a comparison of Saupe's figures of 

 the pronotal shields of his species with the descriptions by Hebard (1917) of 

 B. craniifer and Blaberus atropos (Stoll). The Chilean B. jusca Brunner is a 

 junior synonym of B. atropos (Stoll), a South American insect (Hebard, 1917). 



