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Cockroaches Ultimate Survivalists

 
 
Reply Thu 23 May, 2013 05:09 pm
Wily Cockroaches Find Another Survival Trick: Laying Off the Sweets

Everyone knows that cockroaches are the ultimate survivors, with enough evolutionary tricks up their carapaces to have thrived for 350 million years and to have completely adapted to the human species.

But the nature of the adaptation that researchers in North Carolina described on Thursday in the journal Science is impressive even for such an ancient, ineradicable lineage, experts say. Some populations of cockroaches evolved a simple, highly effective defense against sweet-tasting poison baits: They switched their internal chemistry around so that glucose, a form of sugar that is a sweet come-hither to countless forms of life, tastes bitter.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/24/science/a-bitter-sweet-shift-in-cockroach-defenses.html?_r=0
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Type: Discussion • Score: 2 • Views: 1,106 • Replies: 2
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farmerman
 
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Reply Thu 23 May, 2013 06:45 pm
@edgarblythe,
interesting. Adaptation as a pre evolutionary response to environmental changes is always amazing. These experiments that prove the conditions show how all that training a chemical entomologist undergoes is actually paying off.
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edgarblythe
 
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Reply Thu 23 May, 2013 07:05 pm
I had been wondering why my home made concoctions were not working so well. I recall making sweet baits using my own recipe. The roaches ate it like rednecks at a barbecue and were quickly gone. Now they don't mess with it.
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