The living habits of cockroaches

Cockroaches like to choose warm, humid, food-rich and crevice places to live. These are the four basic conditions needed for breeding. These conditions are generally found in buildings where people live and live. So cockroaches have become health pests that invade thousands of families. Let's take a look at the living habits of cockroaches.

Cockroaches like dark and are afraid of light, and they go out at night, which is also an important habit of cockroaches. During the day they are hidden in dark places, such as indoor furniture, cracks in walls, caves and corners, and sundries. Go out at night, especially after the lights are turned off, or look for food, or seek a mate. As a result, about 75% of the 24 hours a day are at rest.

Cockroaches are omnivorous insects with a wide variety of foods, including bread, rice, cakes, meat and vegetarian cooked foods, melons, fruits and beverages, especially noodles with fragrance, sweetness and oil, and have a habit of eating oil. Brown sugar and maltose are the most attractive to them. In addition to loving all kinds of food, cockroaches often bite on other things, such as cotton and wool products, leather products, paper, books, soap, etc., in housing, warehouses, storerooms, etc., and eat rotten organic matter in places such as outdoor garbage dumps, sewers and toilets, and even bite dead animals. But there are some differences in eating habits among different kinds of cockroaches.

The life span of cockroach adults is also longer, the shortest of Blattella germanica is about 100 days, and the longest life span of Periplaneta Americana can survive as long as 1 year, and the life span also varies with species and environmental conditions. In the case of Blattella germanica with the shortest cycle, it generally takes more than 2 months to complete a generation, and the longest Periplaneta Americana takes more than one year. The length of life history varies not only with species, but also with different temperature, nutrition and other conditions. A fertilized female cockroach produces a large number of egg sheaths in its lifetime, and Periplaneta Americana can produce more than 50 eggs at most, so the cockroach has a strong fecundity.

Cockroach reproduction is a combination of sexual reproduction and asexual reproduction. A mature female cockroach can produce an egg sheath containing 14 eggs every 7 to 10 days. The egg sheath is a colloid and hatches between 20 and 37 ℃. The higher the temperature, the shorter the incubation time. At a constant temperature of 30 ℃, it only takes 20 to 30 days, while the longer one can be more than three months. A female cockroach can reproduce nearly 10,000 offspring a year, up to 100, 000. Under extreme conditions, female cockroaches can also lay eggs without males. In other words, many female cockroaches will be androgynous after mating once, and they can lay eggs continuously without mating.

Cockroaches have the habit of living in groups, and they can often be found in a habitat, as few as a few, and as many as dozens or hundreds of them together, mainly due to the trapping effect of pheromones. Both adults and nymphs of cockroaches can secrete an "aggregation pheromone", which is secreted by the rectal mat and can be excreted with feces. In the places where cockroaches live, it is common to see brown spots in their feces. The more feces, the more cockroaches gather.