why are bedbug and cockroaches so notoriously hard to get rid of?
In: Biology
So, the basic premise of life is to propagate your genes to the next generation. Species have developed several different strategies for this. Each strategy has pros and cons, both for the species and the individual.
A lot of pests use similar strategies of being resistant to several threats, and being able to multiply like crazy. Roaches are actually slightly different, in that they are extremely intelligent, able to learn tasks faster than some mammals, including mice, but I’m lumping them in with pests for now.
Additionally, another strategy is to adapt to environments most other animals avoid. In this case, places that are cool, damp, or otherwise difficult to get to. They also only come out at times that will minimize exposure to potential predators. So you’re not likely to see them until there’s a ton of them, and they are pretty hardy.
But the other thing is that they can reproduce like crazy. If you have 100 roaches and you kill 99, you’ll have 100 roaches again before long. In these cases most exterminators go for the equivalent of the nuclear option of blasting the shit out of a house with several fumigators.
This means that not only are they hard to kill, it’s hard to check to make sure youve killed them all. It’s so difficult to check that most places will just say “if you see any again, just call us and we will redo this again”.
Latest Answers