April i90?.j 



239 



LIVE STOCK. 



DOMESTIC INSECTS : COCKROACHES. 



(Blattidae.) 



If we were to judge from their habits, cockroaches are very plebeian, for the 

 domestic species live in cellars and underground rooms, where there is a certain 

 amount of warmth, coming out at night to feed upon any exposed food,— poor 

 relations of the kitchen and the pantry. Yet if we go back and look up the ancestry 

 of the cockroach we find he can trace his descent from primeval ancestors who 

 hunted through the forests of the Carboniferous Ages ; and so persistent is the type 

 that the fossil cockroaches of the Palaeozoic rocks of North America, described by 

 Scudder, differ very little in general from the insects of to-day. Therefore, in point 

 of ancestry, he is quite a bine-blooded aristocrat, even if he has given up the freedom 

 and dangers of a forest life for the humdrum life of the kitchen. These insects have 

 from a very early date been associated with the habitations of man, and are even 

 found in the temporary shelters of the most primitive. When exploring on the Fly 

 River, in New Guinea, the writer often examined the many bags of food and im 

 plements which the natives (acting on a system of true free-trade) stored away in 

 their large canoes, and frequently found every bag containing thousands of brown 

 cockroaches, often more cockroaches than any thing else, (ripilampra sp.) 



The cockroaches belong to the great order Orthoptera, which comprise grass- 

 hoppers, locusts, and crickets, and have the same kind of biting and chewing mouth 

 of the vegetable feeders ; but under altered conditions they are omnivorous in their 

 tastes, and will eat almost anything, and are carnivorous or even cannibalistic when 

 it comes to a case of hard times, A deep smooth earthenware jar, with some 

 potato-peelings or other food, placed in a convenient place for the insect to drop 

 into will often form a real death-trap, and, on examination a few weeks later, will 

 show a mass of hard legs and wing-covers, the remains of the captives that have 

 been devoured by their imprisoned comrades. 



The insect collector will often find that cockroaches, particularly in the 

 tropics, will play sad havoc with his dead specimens if left anywhere within their 

 reach ; but they cannot, I think, be called carnivorous insects in the true sense of 

 the word,— though Tepper considers, from observations he made in South Australia, 

 that they eat pJ ant-eating ground larvae. 



While there are a few cosmopolitan cockroaches that by the agency of ships 

 have spread all over the world and become domesticated both at home and abroad, 

 the majority are forest-hunting insects, living under logs and stones, or hiding under 

 dead bark on the trunks of trees. They are most abundant in the warm, moist tropical 

 countries ; yet a species is said to occur at times in such quantities in the huts of the 

 Laplanders as to damage large quantities of their stores of dried fish. It is stated 

 on good authority that they cannot stand prolonged or excessive cold, and Hubbard 

 records that in the severe winter of 1894, when the orange groves of Florida were 

 greatly damaged, all the roaches, except a few in the more substantially built houses, 

 were killed. 



The typical cockroach is wonderfully adapted in form and structure for the 

 life it leads ; the whole body is enclosed in a stout, oval, flattened or convex case 

 like the shell of a tortoise, but composed of many transverse plates fitting close 

 together, those upon the back forming a more solid plate of thick chiton than those 

 on the under surface, The head is furnished with long slender antennae composed 



