Cockroaches trouble

[rendoman]

Hi all!
It's summer, and like any summer I have a problem with cockroaches in the garden.
No grass, no plants, only porphyry and a sewage system not particularly well maintained by the municipality. My garden is clean.
I tried local poisons like Pertrin S (permethrin), a couple of traps and a sort of solid food which promised miraculous results. It works for a couple of days, then it's all like before.
In real life, they are still here, every evening after 10pm, one hundred at least are on the ground and on the walls of the courtyard. I really enjoy hitting them with the broom and .177 air rifle, but the number is increasing.

Do you know some very effective way, or powerful product to solve the problem? I asked in the local agrarium consortium shop, they recommended me the bad products tried.

Thanks
Stefano

[Toolmaker51]

To expand on current and entertaining methods; do Strega fly brooms? Supply her with a Moschetto Automatico Beretta Modello 1938, at 600 rounds per minute, she'll get something done!

[rendoman]

Good Idea!
A powerful strega is perfect! If she's beautiful it's even better!

[Moby Duck]

Cockroaches are almost invincible and can even survive intense ionising radiation. When they are stressed, as in squashed with a broom or boot, or poison food or spray, they immediately espress eggs that later hatch into a new generation. There have been experiments where they have been deprived of food and water for many months and they still survive. As a last resort they survive by using up the energy from their brown body colour and become translucent. If they are then offered food, they only eat tiny morsels and hardly move until their colour returns. Some say that if all life is destroyed on the planet, the last to die will be the cockroach. There is an aerosol spray called BV2 that kills them quickly but they return again after the eggs hatch. There are also residual crawling insect/spider sprays that can be sprayed around the base of your house or on fences walls etc and this keeps working for up to 3 months, but new generations will keep their life cycle alive. They love sewers, so check for any possible ways that they can get out of the sewer, loose inspection covers, and air vents without screening are good places to check. Floor drains/scuppers in bathrooms, and other drains have water traps but if not used often the water can evaporate, providing the perfect path for the cockroaches to escape. Local utility providers can “smoke test” your sewers and give you a better idea where escape paths might be. Cockroaches also like warm environments and as our weather is getting warmer, (so they tell me), we have had an explosion in numbers where I live. A couple of starving chickens in the back yard might clean up some of them. Good luck with the battle.

[Jon]

There's even been a proposal to store long term archives of information from human civilization in cockroach DNA, because of their supposed ability to survive a nuclear attack.

Once an archive is selected, it will be written into a computer file and coded into DNA base pairs. The sequences will then be synthesized by conventional protocols. Then the archival DNA will be ligated into cockroach intron DNA via injection into eggs.

Once the archival roaches are born they will be cultivated until the population achieves at least the specified volume (8 cubic feet). The roaches will be released in selected locations in Manhattan. Further cultivations and releases will follow, carefully calculated to assure that the archive is widespread enough to survive for the specified period of time.

Within approximately fourteen years, the archival roaches will inexorably become so endemic as to become an ubiquitous and permanent feature of the island.

In order to decode the archive, a future historian would make use of Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) to amplify and then sequence the fragments, turning the DNA sequence once again into the contents of a computer’s memory. In order to facilitate decoding, the archive will not make use of data compression or encryption technologies.

https://www.nature.com/articles/nbt0100_1b
http://www.jaronlanier.com/roach.html

[Toolmaker51]

There's even been a proposal to store long term archives of information from human civilization in cockroach DNA, because of their supposed ability to survive a nuclear attack........

G' morning Professor; here's my PHD thesis...with his decoding sequence.


The DNA, if reliable might be a good plan.
If some hacker doesn't substitute 'his' for honest records. What's going to happen if a bunch of roaches are found with Mel Brooks "History of the World; Part I" instead?
And "Blazing Saddles"...

[Moby Duck]

I learn something every day. I didn't know about the cockroach DNA proposal. Perhaps we need to examine all existing DNA and look for code that might explain the origin of the Universe. Someone may already have left us a message, and we just have to find it.

[Frank S]

It would probably be some intersteller species who found the cockroaches then decided to do the Jurassic world thing and wind up creating a bunch of human sized cockroaches that turned out partially human, containing all of the knowledge of the human race. Providing they had carried these specimens back to their home world prior to extrapolation or experimenting the Roachmen would wipe them out in short order.