Eli5 Why are cockroaches so resilient?
In: 4
They found an evolutionary niche that basically comes down to “If I can eat things nobody else wants to eat and live in places nobody else wants to live, all while running a body plan so simple that it’s *very* hard to kill, then I will survive and procreate.”
Cockroaches evolved to eat things that almost nothing else will, so they’re almost impossible to starve. Part of that includes immunity to compounds that other animals find toxic, so they’re also hard to poison. They have extremely simple body plans and nervous systems so even grievous injuries may not kill them. They don’t require much oxygen so they’re very hard to suffocate. They’re small and flat so they can shelter in places that few other animals can use. They can survive a very wide temperature range so they’re very hard to kill with cold or heat.
The tradeoff is they have almost no ability to *do* anything beyond eating and making more cockroaches. They don’t build, or hunt, or think, or adapt their environment to them, or post on Reddit. On the spectrum of “Deal with the environment you find” to “Make the environment what you want/need” cockroaches went waaaaaaaay over to the left side, moreso than almost any equivalently sized animal. They’re basically big tardigrades from an ecological niche standpoint.
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