A Houston museum is offering 25 cents per cockroach to fill an exhibit about the wonders of insects that eat decomposing things.
The Houston Museum of Natural Science wants 1,000 American cockroaches, which grow to 2 inches long, can fly and thrive in the city’s sub-tropical climate, said museum entomologist Laurie Pierrel on Wednesday.
They will be part of an exhibit polishing the image of bugs that feed off decaying organic matter and in so doing add to the general cleanliness.
Pierrel said she will be outside the museum the next three Saturdays with a bucket for the bugs and money for the sellers.
How big will the bucket be? I can think of a few really big cockroaches we’d all love to be rid of.
A local (Tucson, AZ) pest control company has annual contests to get the largest cockroach.
J/P=?
We don’t get those huge ones in Minnesota, thank gh0d! Actually, one of the best things about being a Yankee is the overall lack of huge bizarre annoying dangerous bugs. However, since we do get immigrants from all over the world, we have some pretty awful non-native species.
Yee-haw, no posts for hours, and I’m back in the saddle, cowboy! QUESTION: does leaving DVORAK up in a Firefox tab confuse the system, and make it believe I’ve posted recently?
They will be part of an exhibit polishing the image of bugs that feed off decaying organic matter and in so doing add to the general cleanliness.
Bullshit!
There is no exhibit… no explanation… no debate… nothing… that will ever convince me that there is anything good in any way shape or form about cockroaches. They are dirty and nasty.
ALL COCKROACHES MUST DIE! And I will use any and every means at my disposal to eradicate these horrible creatures.
This is an excellent campaign against speciesism. I’m glad to see it. I confess to still being speciesist myself about a few species. I have worked hard to get over my disgust at having roaches in my room when on travel to tropical climes.
That said, I do still detest some species. For a sample, in order of increasing hatred of the species and ignoring microbes, mosquitoes, ticks, bot flies, and humans.
#4 – I think some people actually have cockroaches as pets –
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madagascar_hissing_cockroach
In some 3rd world country probably…
Pierrel said she will be outside the museum the next three Saturdays with a bucket for the bugs and money for the sellers.
What for, yuks? There’s probably enough people in line with enough cockroaches to fill her quota right now. Jeez, it’s Houston.
Living in the tropics, and I did so for many years, one learns to balance things. One good bush cat for the jungle rats (tree rats) and a couple of good geckos for La Cucaracha and the scorpions. Your on your own when it comes to Tarantulas.
Actually, as far as bugs go, cockroaches are fairly clean. These amazing animals will survive anything, and perform an important role as saprophytes, those who consume the dead and dying and haul it off to make (potent) fertilizer. If the museum is successful in collecting bugs, we can breed seven million of them in three months and set them loose in Congress. They eat anything. Even politicos.
#9 – Listen to me you mad insane freak… I live within 1000 miles of Congress, which as far as I am concerned is within the epicenter of your evil roachbomb. If you succeed in breeding 7 million of these Satan spawn bugs, the only thing they’ll turn to fertilizer will be your rotting corpse.
I swear upon all that is holy, I will unleash an epic can of RAID on all you bug loving mutants!
(for those who still don’t get it, I hate cockroaches)
They should have gone to the closest Taco Bell to get them Roaches.
Scrap that, Taco Bell has rats, not cockroaches.
…and you know, as a lifelong despiser of roaches, the ultimate slap-in-the-face is that – no matter what happens – the very last living creatures on this planet will be… guess who??
#13 – Lauren the Ghoti,
Sorry to disappoint you Lauren. Life will continue, probably in quite varied forms, until the sun engulfs our planet.
That said, there really has been only one age of life on this planet, The Age of Bacteria … the age of bacteria … bacteria.
Sorry for almost breaking into song there. But, the vast majority of species on this planet are bacteria. In fact, more than half the biomass of the planet is bacteria.
Anyway, for multicellular creatures, you are right though, cockroaches are a good bet. Ants may be even better. I think I heard that they’d do better than roaches in a nuclear holocaust. Either would be a good bet with climate change.