Cockroaches are so hardy that they can even live nine days without their heads before they starve to death.
For those who think nothing good ever comes from cockroaches, during the Vietnam War, the U.S. used cockroaches to detect farmers who were doubling as Communist guerrillas.
First, suspected Vietcong guerrilla meeting places were sprinkled with synthetic female cockroach pheromones.
Then, questionable Vietnamese farmers were made to walk slowly past cages containing male cockroaches. If a farmer had visited the meeting place earlier, the female scent on him would make the male cockroaches react.
In Brazil, there's a species of cockroach that eats eyelashes, usually those of young children while they are asleep. The hungry little insect is attracted to the minerals and moisture from the tear ducts—but that's not the only moisture they like to devour.
An entomologist was awakened one morning by a tickling sensation, only to find that a "cockroach's extended mouth parts were imbibing moist nutriment from my nostrils."
Cockroaches carry over forty different pathogens, which could potentially be transferred to humans. These include plague, pneumonia, typhoid fever, and possibly polio, hepatitis, and other diseases you don't want to get.
Cockroach crap is one of the causes of asthma.
After food passes the cockroach's mouth parts, it travels backward and the food mixes with spit before they ingest it.
Cockroaches have teeth in their stomachs.
Insect flatulence may account for one-fifth of all the methane emissions on this planet. (Termites are also prodigious farters; indeed, dogs trained to sniff out termites are actually following their farts.)
Cockroaches are among the biggest contributors to global warming, since they break wind every fifteen minutes. Furthermore, they continue to release methane gas for eighteen hours after they die.
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