Dr. Dominic Evangelista

They're easy to handle.

They're interesting to look at.

They're not super ugly.

Maybe to some people they are.

I do think they're good ambassadors.

When entomologists, when we do outreach, we see that kids aren't usually afraid of looking at or handling Madagascar hissing cockroaches, but adults often are.

It's not necessarily something inherently scary about them.

It's just something that we learn over the course of our lives.

Yeah, I've done fieldwork mostly in South America, but also in West Africa.

And it wasn't fieldwork, but I also did a postdoc in Paris, France.

Some of the best researchers of cockroaches, both present and past, have been in the museum in Paris.

You know, once there's a good collection of an insect group somewhere, then that attracts other people to research that insect group.

And it kind of just builds over time.

Paperwork sucks.

But the hardest part is that I'm motivated a lot by conservation.

And I want to use my research in order to understand how to better conserve cockroaches and other animals as well.

Yet, in order to achieve that, I have to kill cockroaches.

a lot of cockroaches.

And if you're listening to this, you hate cockroaches more than me, but I've killed way more than you.

And so it doesn't feel great.