Animal · Nigeria, Ghana, United States
American cockroach
Periplaneta americana — the name this animal has in the language scientists everywhere share.
The American cockroach is the largest cockroach that lives in houses, a shiny reddish-brown insect that covers fifty times its own body length in a second. Despite the name it came from Africa, carried around the world on ships.
Picture credit: Insects Unlocked (CC0) · Len Worthington (CC BY-SA 2.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where does the American cockroach live?
Home: Warm, damp sewers, cellars and drains in hot countries.
In the wild it lives in these countries: Nigeria, Ghana, the United States, Mexico, Brazil, India.
The short profile
Fully grown: about 4 cm long, wings longer than the body. It weighs about 0 001 kilograms. On the menu: both plants and meat.
The story behind it
For its size, this is one of the fastest runners on land. It reaches about 5 km an hour, which sounds slow until you work out that it is fifty body lengths every second, the same as a person sprinting at 330 km an hour. Long antennae and two bristly tails at the back feel the smallest puff of air, so the roach is already moving before a shoe comes down. It eats almost anything organic, from crumbs and beer to glue, leather and the starch in old book bindings, and it can go for weeks on very little. Adults have full wings and will glide down from a high shelf, though they seldom fly properly. One roach can live nearly two years, longer than any other cockroach in our houses.
Find it on the globe
American cockroach is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.
It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.
Questions children ask
Can American cockroaches fly?
Sort of. Adults have working wings and will glide down from a wall or a high shelf, especially when it is warm, but they hardly ever fly any real distance.
Why is it called American if it comes from Africa?
Because Europeans first met it in America. It was carried there on ships from Africa as early as the sixteen hundreds, and the name stuck even after its real home was known.
Why are cockroaches so hard to catch?
Two bristly feelers at the back of the body pick up the tiny gust of air pushed ahead of a moving hand or foot. The roach starts running before the blow lands, and it covers fifty body lengths a second.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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