GAINESVILLE---Take a left at the kitchen sink, a right at the toaster oven and then loop around the cookie jar and up the side to the lid that doesn't quite close.
Those are the kinds of directions German cockroaches are leaving for each other when they navigate around your kitchen, say University of Florida researchers.
And in roach research, that's big news, says entomologist Phil Koehler, of UF's Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences.
"For years, researchers thought that cockroaches randomly walked around your house looking for things to eat," Koehler said.
"It turns out, as they move between food and water sources and their hiding places, they are laying down a chemical trail. And now we've discovered that other cockroaches will follow the trail back to food and water sources. It's very intriguing."
That's only half the news from Koehler and his myth-busting graduate researchers, Dini Miller and Tim McCoy. They've also found that cockroaches, long thought not to use the sense of smell, also are following their noses, or antennae, to food sources.
"These advances are exciting because they could help us develop new baits, perhaps even a bait so effective that you could place just one and then all the cockroaches in the house would swarm over it, eat it and die," Koehler said. "That's exactly what we're looking for."
Anyone who has flipped a light switch in a dark kitchen and watched a roach run around can understand how the "random roach" theory got started. But in the quest for better methods of exterminating roaches, UF researchers have become quite familiar with the ins and outs of roach behavior.
"Cockroaches that are not stressed for food will do other things besides look for food," Koehler said. "They are very curious animals. They like to run around and investigate everything. That's always been interpreted as a non-response to food, when actually they are exhibiting other behaviors. They investigate, then they feed."
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Contact: Cindy Spence
crsp@gnv.ifas.ufl.edu
352-392-1773
University of Florida
30-Apr-1998