Cockroaches, despite their poor reputation, are instrumental to Earth’s ecosystem and play an important role in keeping the planet clean.
There is hardly a more despised animal on the planet than the cockroach. Entire industries have sprung up on the basis of the removal, and destruction, of this insect. They are so hated that even calling someone a roach is an insult. However, the cockroach holds a very important job in Earth’s ecosystem.
“Cockroaches are very important to the environment,” said Lauren Davidson, the manager of the Cockrell Butterfly Center and entomologist at the Houston Museum of Natural Science. “They are important for the decomposition process.”
Cockroaches serve an important role in cleaning up our environment. Their entire purpose is to eat, and by extension remove, any environmental waste that would otherwise have nowhere else to go.
“They’re nature’s garbagemen,” Lauren said on the importance of the cockroach.
Cockroaches do this better than almost any other insect, and for good reason. There are almost 5,000 individual species of cockroaches on the planet, according to Rachel Nuwer in a 2013 Smithsonian article on the insect. Without cockroaches, the planet would be suffocating under mountains of leaf litter, rotting animals, and animal waste.
One reason that roaches are so disliked is because they are considered an unclean pest. While it is true that they spend most of their time eating rotting material, they aren’t unclean at all in most circumstances.
“There can be [disease transmission from cockroaches], but generally there’s not,” Davidson said. “Cockroaches are pretty fastidious. They clean themselves constantly, they don’t like to be dirty.”
Cockroaches have one last important use on our planet, and that is as a reliable food source. As mentioned previously, with thousands of species, it is easy to see why they make up such an important source of protein for so many other organisms. The mass majority of amphibians, lizards, small mammals, wasps, beetles, and even some fungus rely on the cockroach to put dinner on the table. Without them,
the ecosystem would take a massive hit to its biodiversity.
If you find yourself still uncomfortable with the presence of this misunderstood insect, Davidson provides some tools that you can use to help reduce the amount that you see in your home. Although, she prefaces this advice with the understanding that you are never going to make a real difference in the amount of roaches as a whole.
“If you see a big cockroach in your house, generally you should just throw it outside. The chances are, it’s not going to try and come back in… Baits are always what I would recommend as general spraying does not seem to work very well.”
Should things escalate from there, Davidson recommends bringing the issue to a reputable pest control company as “throwing a bunch of poisons around your house” could negatively impact other important insects in your area such as bees and wasps.
So, the next time you see a cockroach in your house, instead of grabbing the nearest shoe, take a moment to capture it, shake its antenna, give it a big thank you, and release it back outside to do what it does best: getting rid of all the garbage we would rather not deal with.