Entomology professor Lynn Kimsey, director of the R. M. Bohart Museum of Entomology at the University of California, Davis, remembers the encounter well.

She was in Panama, studying for her doctorate, and enjoying an oatmeal raisin cookie prepared by a field station cook.

"It was a good cookie," she said, "but as I ate the remaining piece, it didn't taste right."

"The raisin had legs. It was an American cockroach. And yes, cockroaches taste the way they smell. That's the first time I ever came close to losing it."

That was several decades ago.

Today Lynn Kimsey and other entomologists show visitors the highly popular Madagascar hissing cockroach display in the Bohart Museum but no one has expressed any culinary interest in them, despite the heavily publicized roach-eating contests at many of the nation's amusement parks during the Halloween season. The gimmick at the theme parks: eat a Madagascar hissing cockroach and go to the front of the line. Eat the most and win a worldwide contest.

Kimsey doesn't mince words when asked what she thinks about the contests. "I think the whole thing is stupid," she said. "Cockroaches are nasty tasting and probably not very good for you since their fat is packed full of uric acid--pee in disguise."

"They're a solid mass of white fat," she said. "It's like drinking pee. Why would you want to do that?"

Senior museum scientist Steven Heydon agrees. "You could, but why?"

The cockroaches (Gromphadorhina portentosa), native to Madagascar, an island off the coast of Africa, are among the world's largest roaches. They measure two to three inches in length and an inch wide, about the size of a small mouse. They show their Halloween colors year around: black with orange markings on their abdomen.

In the wild, they live in rotting logs on the forest floor, feeding on fallen fruit and fecal matter. At the Bohart Museum, the "hissers" (as scientists call them) dine on fruits and vegetables, preferring apples, lettuce and yams. "They eat a little dry dog food (Kibbles), but the hissers are more vegetarian than most other cockroaches," Kimsey said.

The Madagascan roaches hiss when disrupted or threatened, a defense mechanism meant to scare predators and alert their neighbors to danger. Male roaches also hiss during courtship and mating. The sound occurs when the roaches forcibly expel air through a pair of modified abdominal spiracles, or pores, part of their respiratory system.

Several years ago, the Fear Factor television show gifted the Bohart Museum with several dozen of the giant insects. "We received a big infusion for our colony left over from the Fear Factor," Heydon said. The insect appears to be the Fear Factor's favorite roach. On one segment, each Fear Factor participant occupied a coffin with 15,000 hissers. In another, upside-down contestants used their mouths to transfer the roaches, nightcrawlers and millipedes to another container.

Bohart Museum scientists have maintained terrariums of Madagascar hissing cockroaches for some 30 years. At any given time, the museum has hundreds of them. "It's the most popular display among the kids, because of three reasons: the hissing sound they make, their size and their appearance," said Kimsey. "The kids like to hold them and listen to them hiss. But toward the end of the day, the cockroaches adjust to all the handling and don't hiss as much."

What do kids ask about them?

"They already know a lot about them," Kimsey said. "Well, one thing about hissers is that they're deaf. They have nothing to hear with."

"In her entire lifetime, spanning a couple of years, the female cockroach produces only about 100 babies. Other cockroaches produce that many in a couple of months; flies, a couple of weeks; and aphids, a couple of days."
Female hissers are ovoviviparous; they carry their developing eggs inside their bodies in an purse-like capsule known an ootheca. The roaches appear to give "live birth" to nymphs but the eggs actually hatch into nymphs that emerge from the egg case. Some 20 to 40 young are born at a time.
The Madagascan cockroaches are easy to care for. "You just add food and you get more," Kimsey quipped. They move slowly, are docile, emit little or no odor, and do not bite.

"I was thinking about giving them names or painting their names on them," she said. "Like Fred, Sally. People names."

In Panama, the doctorate students painted messages on them. Folks would encounter wandering cockroaches sporting such greetings as "Hi, how are you today?"





Sidebar

Bohart Museum Home to Three Large Cockroach Species

The Bohart Museum of Entomology on the UC Davis campus, houses three of the world's largest cockroaches: the Death Head (Blaberus cranifer), collected from a bat roost in Panama; Peppered or Peruvian Cockroach (Archimandrita tesselata) from Peru; and Madagascar hissing cockroaches (Gromphadorhina portentosa) from Madagascar.
Considered "living fossils," cockroaches are some 250 million years old, living on earth long before dinosaurs. More than 3,500 species of cockroaches in 450 genera exist today.
Some entrepreneurs use Madagascar hissing cockroaches to make live jewelry, leashing the roach to a brooch. Some roaches drive miniature "coaches." Other compete in "roach races." Internet users can view cockroaches in action on the University of South Carolina camcorder, http://cricket.biol.sc.edu/usc-roach-cam.html.

The Bohart Museum, founded in 1946, is dedicated to teaching, research and service, and houses some 7 million specimens in its worldwide collection, said director Lynn Kimsey. The collection focuses on terrestrial and fresh water invertebrates and is home to the California Insect Survey, a storehouse of the insect biodiversity of California's deserts, mountains, coast and central valley.

The museum, at 1124 Academic Surge, is open weekdays from 8:30 a.m. to noon and 1 to 5 p.m. Group tours can be arranged with senior museum scientist Steve Heydon at (530) 752-0493 or by e-mailing the museum at bmuseum@ucdavis.edu.
The Web site is at http://bohart.ucdavis.edu/