Big cockroaches live beneath Price Hall at Virginia Tech University. The stately, gray, five-story building, built of stone over a century ago, houses the school’s entomology department, whose faculty study the insects that flourish in our forests, farms, and, often, homes. Sometimes, these reddish-brown American cockroaches — the largest species of cockroach in the U.S. — will leave their underworld dwellings, crawl through the structure’s old pipes, and creep into Price Hall, said Dini Miller, an urban entomologist at the university.
“I’m kind of thrilled about it,” she added.
Miller has devoted her academic career to the flat-bodied, six-legged, and often abhorred pests, developing a keen understanding of why roaches have proven so resilient in our modern world, a world where many inspect species — but certainly not all — have been eviscerated by pesticides and the destruction of their habitats. Moths, dung beetles, wasps, bees, and dragonflies have all been given well-deserved PR recently from new widely-reported research and an expertly-told front page story in The New York Times Magazine, foretelling environmental doom should we annihilate the foundation of the planet’s food web. Read more…
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