New research findings have found there are similarities between cockroaches and humans living in New York City.
"Once they move in, they don't leave," Mark Stoeckle, a senior research associate at Rockefeller University told The Wall Street Journal. "This is a window into cockroach society and it is very much like our own." Stoeckle is working on a generic study called the National Cockroach Project.
New findings show cockroaches remain in neighborhoods where they grew up and separate themselves in a practice very similar to the city's ethnic groups and income classes The Journal reported. More interesting is the fact that the insects ancestors arrived to America as cargo.
"They say a lot about how we live and interact with the environment around us," Sergios-Orestis Kolokotronis, an assistant professor of biology at Fordham University told The Journal. "In an urban area, they reflect and magnify our own behavior."
Dr. Stoeckle's team found a cockroach on city's upper east side is different from one on the upper west side, and Roosevelt Island. Eighty percent of cockroaches on west side are part of the same gene pool. On Roosevelt Island, 90 percent of cockroaches are part of the same group.
Stoeckle gathered 125 specimens of cockroaches over the past year from throughout the United States, the majority of them coming from New York. The insects, which arrived dead, came from as far as Australia to Stoeckle's laboratory on the city's upper east side where he is assisted by high school students.
"To be honest, I was really grossed out by this at first," Joyce Xia, a 17-year-old Hunter College High School student told The Journal, "But, after a while, you get over it."
While Stoeckle's research has not found what physical or behavioral differences may exist in cockroach groups, his work in seeing how the insects vary genetically could lead to a solution on how to exterminate the species.
