Cockroaches Ultimate Survivalists

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