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Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. Hi, brain Stuff,

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Speaker 1: Lauren vocal bomb here. What if there were no cockroaches?

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Speaker 1: The question sounds like it's straight out of the marketing

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Speaker 1: materials from Paradise. Cockroaches spread bacteria like salmonella, they leave

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Speaker 1: droppings behind everywhere they walk, and they can exacerbate allergies

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Speaker 1: and asthma. All are good reasons to squash them all,

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Speaker 1: but not so fast. Only a few species of roaches

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Speaker 1: out of an estimated five to ten thousand, are commonly

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Speaker 1: found infesting homes. Most cockroaches live in warm, tropical climates,

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Speaker 1: happily minding their own business and staying out of humans business.

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Speaker 1: Some are even beautiful, no really, and glow in the dark.

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Speaker 1: But if you are still determined to play this game out,

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Speaker 1: then would better take a look at what would happen

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Speaker 1: if they all disappeared? Long story short, it's not good.

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Speaker 1: In tropical forests. Cockroaches feed on decaying wood and leaves,

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Speaker 1: and all those droppings they leave the hind well. They're

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Speaker 1: filled with organic debris and nutrients, including nitrogen, which are

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Speaker 1: added back into the soil. Nitrogen is essential to the

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Speaker 1: growth of trees, which are essential to forests and our

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Speaker 1: own lives, since we use wood products to shelter both

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Speaker 1: ourselves and the animals that we do actually like. Oh

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Speaker 1: and speaking of those animals that we like, especially small mammals, birds,

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Speaker 1: and reptiles, they feed on cockroaches. And since other animals

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Speaker 1: feed on these small mammals and reptiles, disrupting even this

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Speaker 1: one small skittering link in the food chain could have

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Speaker 1: a widespread effect on the world around us. So the

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Speaker 1: next time you're tempted to smash a cockroach before it

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Speaker 1: runs under your fridge, consider that it may be helping

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Speaker 1: to refuel a local forest when it isn't hanging around

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Speaker 1: your house. Or I mean, go ahead, but don't wish

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Speaker 1: death on the whole lot of them worldwide. Don't worry, though,

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Speaker 1: they are in no risk of going extinct anytime soon.

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Speaker 1: Cockroaches have been around since before the dinosaurs. Cockroach fossils

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Speaker 1: show that they've been around for at least three hundred

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Speaker 1: million years. That's some serious staying power. They really are

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Speaker 1: some of the hardiest creatures around, capable of withstanding radiation

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Speaker 1: and huge doses far more than a human could handle,

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Speaker 1: and going without food for up to a month. So

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Speaker 1: If you do squash one scurrying across your floor, you're

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Speaker 1: in no danger of having doomed these resourceful bugs to extinction.

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Speaker 1: Today's episode was written by Karen Kirkpatrick and produced by

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Speaker 1: Tyler Clang and Tristan McNeil. For more on this and

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Speaker 1: lots of other creepy Crawley topics, visit our home planet,

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Speaker 1: how Stuff works dot com