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saw four dead cockroaches next to the bait i left two months backlike, i'm glad it's working, but
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@hakui only works until they evolve to not eat the bait, which is speedy
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@shmibs c-can't evolve if they're dead, right...?
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@hakui The pesticide chlordane was first used in homes in 1948. It was a wonder pesticide, one so toxic to insects that it was thought to be invincible. By 1951, however, German cockroaches in Corpus Christi, Texas, were resistant to chlordane. In fact, the roaches were a hundred times more resistant to the pesticide than were laboratory strains.1 By 1966, some German cockroaches had evolved resistance to malathion, diazinon, and fenthion. Soon thereafter, German cockroaches were discovered that were fully resistant to DDT. Each time a new pesticide was invented, it was just a few years, or sometimes just a few months, before some population of German cockroaches evolved resistance. Sometimes, resistance to an old pesticide would even confer resistance to a new pesticide. In those cases, the battle was over before it even started.2 Once they evolved, resistant strains of cockroaches would spread and, so long as the pesticide continued to be used, thrive.3 Each of these tit-for-tat responses of cockroaches to our sinister chemical ingenuity was impressive. Lineages of cockroaches were rapidly evolving entirely new ways to avoid, process, or even take advantage of our poisons. But these responses were nothing compared to what was recently discovered in the building next to my office. The story of that discovery began more than twenty years earlier on the other side of the country, in California, where it involved two main protagonists: an entomologist named Jules Silverman and a family of German cockroaches named “T164.”[...]Imagine that a family of German cockroaches moves into a big apartment building. Over time, a few cockroaches can become many more. Every six weeks, a female cockroach can produce an egg capsule containing up to forty-eight eggs. At this rate (which is fast relative to human reproduction but pretty ordinary for an insect), even if an individual female German cockroach lives only long enough to produce an egg case twice she can nonetheless give rise to ten thousand descendants in a year.20 When an exterminator places baits throughout the building and all of these thousands of cockroaches die, no evolution occurs. No particular versions of genes are favored relative to any other versions. The story is over until German cockroaches colonize the building anew and are baited again. If some of the cockroaches survive, however, and if their survival relates to a trait encoded in their genes but absent in those of the cockroaches that died, then the use of baits would actually favor the surviving cockroaches and their versions of genes. This is what Jules came to believe happened, that some version of some gene or set of genes made the T164 German cockroaches less attracted to glucose, or even repulsed by it. The T164 cockroaches had been favored, he thought, by the glucose baits and then, in their success, had rendered the baits useless.Jules next sampled German cockroaches from around the world for glucose aversion. In many places where glucose baits had been used, from Florida to South Korea, the cockroaches had evolved aversion. And they appeared to have evolved this aversion independently in each of these places. Jules tried to repeat this finding in the lab to see whether he could actually experimentally cause evolution to occur. He gave German cockroach populations glucose baits laced with insecticide. The changes he saw in the lab resembled those occurring in the wild: over relatively few generations, glucose aversion evolved.[...]Wada-Katsumata’s results slowly accumulated. There was no key moment. Eventually, the answer was finally so clear no more testing was necessary. The T164 cockroaches and the wild type cockroaches both perceived fructose as sweet in the same way that the cockroaches she had studied in Japan perceived each other’s sex signals as sweet. Fructose triggered their sweet neurons. The wild cockroaches also perceived glucose as sweet. All of this was as expected. But—and here was the key—the cockroaches Jules had dragged with him city to city —his tether to his former life, the T164 specimens—perceived glucose as bitter.38[...]For example, Wada-Katsumata has shown that not only were the surviving cockroaches averse to glucose but also, in regions where baits were originally baited with fructose rather than glucose, the roaches evolved to perceive the fructose as bitter instead.
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@hakui just use sticky-tape or somethingor better, stop worrying about bugs so much; give yourself allergies and imbalance local ecosystems so certain populations explode
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@shmibs i know, b-butvlcsnap-2016-05-24-08h13m11s246…
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@hakui (...though here's scorps are terrifying but ;_;)
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@hakui they do, mmm; what happens every year here is that cricket populations explode and they crawl all over the house; then a mother scorp or so will get in (their breeding season comes a month later or so), chonk babies all over, and they swarm and eat everythingmeanwhile have to check bed thoroughly every time laying down, or inside food boxes / walls and ceilings and the undersides of stuff, and still get stung while asleep or at random times, and it hurts a lot and makes me shake and heart go weird and body parts numb and stays for days and is bad XX
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@shmibs don't they at least eat other bugs
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@hakui also have goki that think it's fun to breed in the sewer somewhere every year, so need to keep stoppers on all drains XX
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@hakui go a bit crazy from these,,, but thankfully our rattlesnakes and gila monsters are shy, and the coyotl are just cute unless you're an infant or tiny dog. wolf spodes and tarantula are spooky, but mostly harmless. javelina are the most annoying/kinda scary, rove around in packs, have to stay out of their way, and will go rummaging and knocking over bins and things
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@shmibs ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;sounds almost australian over there, how do you handle it
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