Dr. Dominic Evangelista

But yeah, generally, cockroaches are not portrayed in the way that I see them.

I don't think about the American cockroach very much.

And that's usually what is used in movies and TV and stuff, is the American cockroach.

So there's a group of cockroaches from South America called Neoblatelini.

They're very common in the Amazon, and they really haven't been studied at all in

50 years i think about them a lot because i want to study them they're super diverse some of them are quite pretty some of them are like yellowy colored but they have a lot of intricate patterns and they're another one of the groups that have very interesting genitalia diversity in their genitalia but it's impossible to work with them because so much of the work is is like 100 years old that we can't even really identify them i just think about them a lot because

I want to study them.

I want to know what they're doing.

I have.

So that example of the extinct cockroach, the Simandoa cockroach, that's always the example I throw out when people ask about like, oh, will cockroaches survive the apocalypse?

Well, we know of that one and it went extinct pretty quickly, we think.

Like I said before, they're some of the best mothers in the animal kingdom.

Just the amount of

different parental care strategies that you'll see in them.

If you live in a place where you can go outside and see like forest cockroaches, like if you live in South America or in an area with a wet tropical forest, go out and try to take pictures of them.

Some of them are very pretty.

If anyone goes to my iNaturalist page and look at my favorites, so that's, I'm roach brain on iNaturalist and look at my favorites, like,

I don't see how you could look at some of these pictures of beautiful cockroaches and just not think, oh, okay, that's actually kind of nice.

If not, wow, that's beautiful.

Yeah, they're fun.