I just read a post from Sandy Steinman's nature blog called Natural History Wanderings. Turns out a recent exploration of the cockroach population in SW USA has turned up 39 new species! Mostly subterranean, they were largely ignored for nearly 100 years. This brings back memories of many lunch time debates between splitters and lumpers, not to mention my study in Invertebrate Natural History of the coackroaches on New Orleans sidwalks at night. It turns out the very big ones we'd catch while taking evening walks with our dates were a fascinating laboratory animal. We would remove the wings, fasten the live cockroach to a piece of cardboard, then watch the heart beating through the rather transparent skin on the back. We would adminster various chemicals that increased or decreased the heart rate. From a purely pragmatic point of view, we never got reported for animal cruelty because no one cared about cockroaches - except perhaps for me. When I moved on to take a course in parasitology, I got to discover the incredible variety of organisms that populated the cockroachs' intestines. I still have my report from 1962.
This moves me to look in my photo archive and gather up what photos I have of the cockroaches inhabiting the Plumas National Forest. I've never found one in my house in Quincy. They must be content with conditions in the adjacent forest.
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