Resiliant Roaches

[Nich]

I heard what i thought were urband legens of cockroaches living for several days up to a week with no head. I went to feed my 1" versi a roachling...so i decapitated it (bout .5") and tossed it in. That was 3 days ago!!!! i took it out after it didnt get eaten over night and went to throw it away....then it crawled up my hand...lol! i was shocked, so i stuck in a jar iand it's still walkin around when i poke it....that is crazy . I think if humans kill off the majority of life on earth these will be the ones left standing(or skittering through the ruble)....i asked my dad bout the issue and he says they have found them in places were any living thing should be fried from rad exposure(he inspects nuclear plants). These are some crazy critters and have gained some respect from mwah!!! Super critters in my book!

ps...heres 2 pics
3.5 days...post-decapitation!

http://img28.photobucket.com/albums/v83/NichOConnor/r-038F.jpg
http://img28.photobucket.com/albums/v83/NichOConnor/rr-039F.jpg

You can tell by the background that hes holding on in both....they are truly super bugs!

 

[Code Monkey]

Kept at high relative humidity, a roach can survive upwards of a month and will survive about 3 or so days in just about any conditions. They will attempt to use their non-existent mandibles to clean their tarsi because much of the stereotyped behaviors are controlled through the body ganglia as opposed to the brain.

If you want to hear the really weird part (which we don't understand in full yet) if you use an electrified plate as a negative stimulus to a decapitated roach's leg it will still go ahead and lift it up to avoid the negative stimulus. If you keep the stimulus in place it will learn to hold the leg up for as long as necessary. That's not the weird part.

This is: if the roach never learned this particular avoidance before being decapitated, it can only store this learned behavior short term. For example, lets say you electrified the plate in 20 second bursts, the roach would learn to hold the leg up for 20 second periods, but if you then waited a half hour since the last electric shock, the roach would have to undergo another bout of "touch, OW, touch, OW, touch, OW OW OW!" before it relearned the period of stimulus to avoid. However, and this makes no sense yet, if you taught the roach the avoidance behavior prior to decapitation, the decapitated roach reacts to the negative stimulus like a pro. There's some sort of memory possible in the ganglia, but it takes the control of the brain to initiate its storage.

 

[Leggz]

This is fascinating, yet truly begs the question.....who sits around and thinks to themselves, "I wonder how this living thing will behave after I tear its head from its body?"

 

[Code Monkey]

This is fascinating, yet truly begs the question.....who sits around and thinks to themselves, "I wonder how this living thing will behave after I tear its head from its body?"

That one's easy: insect physiologists trying to puzzle out what controls what. Ablation (body part removal) experiments are an old and valuable tool of the science. One of the professors here likes to joke this is why he never wanted to work with fuzzy animals, people get upset if you try to do this stuff to them.

 

[Nich]

This is fascinating, yet truly begs the question.....who sits around and thinks to themselves, "I wonder how this living thing will behave after I tear its head from its body?"

I DID!!!!! i did little experiments for like an hour, but thats just me with too much time!!! If only i were that tough......