Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff production of iHeart Radio. Hey brain Stuff.
Speaker 1: Lauren Vogelbam here with great news. Cockroaches are quickly becoming
Speaker 1: resistant to several different insecticides all at the same time.
Speaker 1: Cool cool, cool one. Michael Scharf, a professor in the
Speaker 1: Department of Entomology at Purdue University, along with his team
Speaker 1: found that these pests are developing cross resistance to multiple
Speaker 1: classes of exterminators insecticides. The team's work was published in
Speaker 1: the June twenty nineteen issue of Scientific Reports. The problem
Speaker 1: is that each class of insecticides works differently to kill
Speaker 1: these critters, so exterminators frequently mix them or switch them
Speaker 1: up to combat infestations. Cockroaches are resistant to multiple insecticides, well,
Speaker 1: you can see where this is going. Scharf and his
Speaker 1: team used apartment buildings in Indiana and Illinois that had
Speaker 1: infestations of German cockroaches as their experimental grounds. First, because
Speaker 1: tomor g is very glamorous, they caught some of the
Speaker 1: roaches and tested them to see which insecticides had the
Speaker 1: lowest resistance on the roaches. Low resistance means the roaches
Speaker 1: would be more vulnerable to the treatments which the scientists
Speaker 1: went on to use for six months. Scharf said in
Speaker 1: a press release, if you have the ability to test
Speaker 1: the roaches first and pick an insecticide that has a
Speaker 1: low resistance, that ups the odds. But even then we
Speaker 1: had trouble controlling populations. The researchers rotated three different insecticides.
Speaker 1: That method kept the roach population stable over six months,
Speaker 1: meaning it neither increased nor decreased. When they mixed two insecticides,
Speaker 1: the roach population flourished, according to the press release, flourished
Speaker 1: being just about the last verb anyone wants to hear
Speaker 1: when talking about cockroaches. When the team used just one
Speaker 1: insecticide for the entire six months and the roaches had
Speaker 1: low resistance to that particular insecticide, they were nearly wiped out. Well, great, right,
Speaker 1: Not really, because if even ten percent of the roaches
Speaker 1: had resistance to that insecticide, the population would increase, Scharf said,
Speaker 1: quote four to sixfold in just one generation. We didn't
Speaker 1: have a clue that something like that could happen this fast.
Speaker 1: During this test, the roaches also developed resistance to several
Speaker 1: other kinds of insecticides, even if the new generations had
Speaker 1: never been exposed to them before. So now what Scharf said.
Speaker 1: He recommends combating roaches with more than chemical warfare, including
Speaker 1: traps and vacuums. Quote. Some of these methods are more
Speaker 1: expensive than using only insecticides, but if those insecticides aren't
Speaker 1: going to control or eliminate a population, you're just throwing
Speaker 1: money away. Oh and hey, you've probably heard that roaches
Speaker 1: can survive a nuclear blast, and the terrible news is
Speaker 1: that that appears to be true. Remember the show MythBusters.
Speaker 1: Their team set up an experiment that exposed German cockroaches
Speaker 1: to different levels of radiation. One group was exposed level
Speaker 1: similar to those omitted by the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
Speaker 1: For a month, ten thousand rads, ten percent of the
Speaker 1: group was still alive. Maybe we should just go ahead
Speaker 1: and bow to our cockroach overlords now. Today's episode was
Speaker 1: written by Kristen hall Geisler and produced by Tyler Clay.
Speaker 1: Brain Stuff is production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works.
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