Dr. Dominic Evangelista

I do believe they're used as like a medicinal remedy in Eastern Asia.

And I've never eaten a cockroach.

The whole bit about them not peeing, but saving their pee in their bodies makes them seem not that appetizing.

Yeah.

Some species I have been curious about, like Panclora, the banana cockroach.

They're kind of green.

They're one of the ones that are potentially pollinators and drinking nectar.

They might taste nice.

What's going on?

Yeah, that's a great question.

Now I just can't... For a second, I thought maybe the cockroaches were eating the bugles.

Yeah, so...

Parental care, another superpower of cockroaches.

So like some of the subsocial ones, the females will stick around their offspring and protect them in burrows.

In termites and the ones related to termites, they need to have these endosymbionts in their gut that help them eat wood.

And so the parents stick around to feed that to them.

They also feed it to them through their butts by eating each other's butt secretions.

So another beautiful aspect of their physiology.

A defining feature of cockroaches is that egg case.

But in some lineages, that egg case has been modified.