Happy New Year:Glowing Cockroaches For All!

 So let's start a new yearly tradition: Find our favorite new species discovered this past year. There were a lot of cool things, including a tyrannosaurid and a smallish extinct felid from Tibet. My pick, however, goes to...

Via Pintrest.

...a cockroach. An adorable, glow-in-the-dark cockroach, but still a cockroach. It has been dubbed  Luchihormetica luckae, with no good common name. We'll just call him "Lucky" for the rest of this entry; nobody wants to write that name out ten plus times, and face it, this is one of the more likeable cockroaches out there. Just don't get any ideas about stealing his Lucky Charms. He really doesn't like that.

Here's why this little cockroach of glowy awesomeness was picked over a T-Rex relative: I have never seen anything like Lucky! It's apparently mimicking another toxic, glow in the dark insect called a click beetle. This beetle is toxic; that paint job is warning colors. This is the only known instance of a glow being used as mimicry. Yeah, these guys will survive the apocalypse just fine.

Bioluminescent bugs are rare. The most commonly-known ones are glow worms and fireflies. Along with glowing on its body, the "eyes" on its glowy outline are pools of bioluminescent bacteria. Don't "ew" that - if you didn't have E.coli in your gut, let's just say digestion would be a lot harder. It's exciting to have another glowing bug to add to the short list!

Lucky was found in the rainforests of Ecuador near an active volcano. That's a pretty bizarre environment if you think about it. There cannot be too many rainforests like that around, meaning that this cockroach might only be able to live in that one area. Save the rainforest - it has neon roaches! It sounds weird to use a cockroach as a reason to protect the rainforest, but darnit, this is a gorgeous one!

Happy New Year! May many new species be discovered in 2014!

Bio-Art: Roachbots.

I'm going to let the video do the introducing this time:



Now, WTF was that? A company called "Backyard Brains" has released a series of kits related to neurology and cockroaches. Some of them just feature moving cockroach legs with a few wires. The more impressive kits allow one to brainwash cockroaches. No, you do not need a degree of any kind to do this; that's the whole point.

As the site itself puts it, "Backyard Brains enables anyone to be a neuroscientist."  The site has a series of experiments, all of which can be dome with their kits and a few things found in most households. Another famous invention of theirs is the "SpikerBox," which amplifies the sound of neurons to an audible level. It's all pretty cool, and a lot of it will be fuel for future entries.

The "RoboRoach" involves stimulating the antenna nerves of cockroaches so that one can have a brainwashed roach puppet for a few minutes. The whole thing is done via a "backpack" that fills the antennae with fine wire, which in turn tells the cockroach where to move via nerve pulses. You can only tell it to do things like move left and right, but that's still pretty nifty. Same basic idea as RatBot, only less precise and using an icky roach instead of a cute rat.

It's not that this idea has not been touched on before. There was an old cartoon involving robot roaches. One also appeared on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but do note that these RoboRoaches will not become the roachinator above.  Roachbot is not a real cockroach; it still works just as good as RoboRoach for freaking out your friends. Have fun messing with household pests!

Creature Feature: Leaproach.

Sure, they'll never get an awesome story glamourizing how awesome they are at surviving, but you still have to admire that cockroaches are so good at surviving that they've been around, and will be around, longer than we have or ever will.

Oh, and they have evolved to leap. Wait, what?



Yes, in 2011, a leaping cockroach (Saltoblattella montistabularis) - "leaproach," if you will- was discovered in Africa. If it's any comfort, it feeds on grasshopper droppings. Come off it- anyone who has done research beyond the school books knows that plenty of animals literally eat crap. It is not even an inch long, so should you be in South Africa and come across one, there's a good chance you will not even notice its existence.

This creature is not a grasshopper. It is, however, an astounding example of convergent evolution - looks like a grasshopper, hops like a grasshopper, but isn't a grasshopper. Instead, it is a cockroach with grasshopper traits and the astounding superpowers of cockroaches. It can jump up to 50 times its body length, and living entirely on excrement is also quite the feat.

Believe it or not, leaping cockroaches used to be a common thing. Until this discovery, they had not been seen since the Jurassic Period. Part of me also wonders if some of them might have survived long enough to make it into the Bible and appear as one of the plagues in Exodus - even though locusts are totally another creature. This is still a horror-roach that deserves some terrifying mention.

But wait, is it? This cockroach is hardly a pest. It feeds off of the crap of pests, but is not a pest in itself. It's tiny. I daresay it's almost cute. And hey, roaches aren't all that bad; they're just better survivalists than we are. Maybe we should embrace the cute roach and treat it as a peace offering - riiight before the insects conquer us for real. Yeah, still waiting on that.