Alex Neason

And it made me wonder, if you take away all the different layers of human filth that we've placed on the roach...

What's left?

What is that animal?

Yeah, so like they live basically anywhere that there's vegetation.

So jungle, forests, and they eat primarily organic matter.

Leaves, decomposing trees, logs.

They're decomposers, so they also eat like the bodies of dead animals and plants.

It's so funny to think of them like not in a house or a city or something, like that they're actually like forest creatures, you know?

Yeah, yeah.

And actually, I thought I would end this story by taking you there to the place they came from.

We're deep in a tropical rainforest in the Congo Basin.

Huge trees, kapoks and mahogany, tower hundreds of feet overhead, their canopies filled with monkeys and parrots and eagles.

The air is thick and humid.

And on the ground, scurrying along the edge of a rotten log, is a female American cockroach.

And this one is about to become a mother.

At the base of her abdomen is a reddish capsule called an utheca.

It's shaped like a tiny kidney bean.

Inside it are 16 eggs.

She carries them and incubates them within this protective casing, dragging it along like a wagon.

She pauses, briefly, to nibble at the edge of a damp leaf.