A female German roach may produce as many as forty oothecae during a lifetime of one year, and

She stores the sperm and uses them as needed, and they can last her a lifetime.

excellent models for neurobiology.

The ootheca, itself, is a marvelous construction, designed to offer the right amount of humidity and correct temperature for the fertilized eggs to develop. In the ootheca of the German cockroach, for instance, there is a little space left above the compartment for each egg that has a microscopic opening to the outer air.

Cockroaches represent the awful thoughts and feelings lying just under each of our surfaces, lurking just behind the facades we present to the world. We know that repressing these dark desires, rather than acknowledging them, can have disastrous consequences for human beings. Like these pools of darkness in our own selves, cockroaches cannot be eli

When the nymphs are ready to emerge, which can be anywhere from fifteen to ninety days in the ootheca, depending on the species, they begin swallowing air, increasing their size,

They predated dinosaurs by more than 150 million years, and humans by more than 300 million.

Seen in profile, a cockroach’s head is always bowed. Its waxy exoskeleton and its shape allow it to squeeze into extremely small spaces, and it can utilize a tremendous range of substances for nourishment.

The cockroach lives in our dark spaces, it constantly reminds us that other worlds exist at the margins of all our lives, worlds that obey drastically different orders from the one we know. Roaches construct a whole other reality, which they weave into our own. It is there under the sink, behind the refrigerator, inside the pipes, or just on the ot