Word: cockroaches
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...likely. we've deployed everything from sex hormones to roach-killing wasps in our billion-dollar war against the cockroach, and we haven't made much of a dent. Over the past decade, better bait and smarter tactics have knocked the roach from first to third on the household-pest hit parade (after ants and termites), but there are still a lot more of them than...
...problem is that after 350 million years of evolution, your kitchen-variety cockroach is exquisitely designed for survival. A single female German cockroach (the most prolific of the seven major pest species) generates 35,000 descendants a year on a diet of just about anything: table scraps, toothpaste, glue, hair--even, in a pinch, her young. Such fecundity has evolutionary benefits. The more offspring she produces, the better the chance that one of them will be born resistant to whatever poisons future scientists decide to spray. Today's best roach bait is almost universally fatal, but it's only...