An Australian man has received medical treatment to remove a large cockroach that had burrowed into his ear.

Local media reported that the 2cm pest caused agonising pain for Hendrik Helmer, and defied his efforts to suck it out with a vacuum cleaner.

It was finally killed by doctors at a hospital in the northern city of Darwin and removed using forceps.

“They said they had never pulled an insect this large out of someone’s ear,” he told ABC News.

Mr Helmer awoke on Wednesday morning to a sharp pain in his right ear.

At first he thought a poisonous spider had made its way into his ear canal.

When the pain intensified Mr Helmer tried to remove the unwelcome guest with a vacuum cleaner and by squirting water into his ear.

“Whatever was in my ear didn’t like it at all,” he said.

As the pain become more excruciating, his flatmate rushed him to hospital where a doctor tried putting oil down the ear canal.
But that only made the cockroach crawl in deeper, before it eventually began to die.

“Near the 10 minute mark… somewhere about there, he started to stop burrowing but he was still in the throes of death twitching,” Mr Helmer said.

It was then that the doctor was able to put forceps into his ear and and pull out the cockroach.

“She [the doctor] said, ‘You know how I said a little cockroach, that may have been an underestimate’,” he said.

Mr Helmer told ABC he was not suffering any major discomfort and would not be taking any additional precautions before going to sleep.

But he said his friends were strongly advising him to go to bed with headphones on.

Cockroach facts
•    There are about 4,600 species of cockroach and fewer than 30 of these are considered pests. (By contrast, there are about 5,400 species of mammals)
•    The world’s smallest cockroach is only 0.3mm long and lives in ant nests
•    The heaviest cockroach is the huge Australian Rhinoceros Cockroach at 8cm in length
Source: Natural History Museum

bbcnews

A species of cockroach native to Asia that has been seen crawling around an outdoor tourist destination in New York City can survive the city’s often brutal winters, according to a new study.

Researchers at Rutgers University in New Jersey have identified the resilient pest as Periplaneta japonica, which is native to Japan. Until an exterminator saw the bug last year crawling around the High Line, an elevated, outdoor park in lower Manhattan, it had not been confirmed in the United States.

While it was too soon to predict the implications for nearby residents and businesses, the bug’s appearance could be good news, researchers said.

“[Cockroaches] combined numbers inside buildings could actually fall because [the] more time and energy they spent competing [for food and space] means less time and energy to devote to reproduction,” said Rutgers biologist Dominic Evangelista, who helped identify the species by analysing its DNA barcode.

How the bugs got to New York was unclear, but researchers speculated they were in the soil of one of the plants festooning the park.

Researchers noted the new roach cannot breed a hybrid super-roach by mating with the more common local variety due to mismatching genitalia.

Cockroaches will eat anything. Except sugar, that is.

Some of the common pests have evolved to learn how to detect and avoid a certain kind of glucose often used in bait traps, according to research published in the US journal Science on Thursday.

Scientists focused on the slender and small brown German cockroaches, which live all over the world in homes, offices and apartment buildings – anywhere humans tread and leave crumbs behind.

An apparent disdain for sweet-laced traps was first observed in some of these roaches in the early 1990s, about seven to eight years after commercial traps using glucose came on the market and entered into widespread use, said researcher Coby Schal of North Carolina State University.

The roaches were evolving quickly, scientists found. New generations were emerging that had inherited a genetic aversion to glucose.

And now, Schal says he and his colleagues understand why.

Glucose-averse roaches use their small taste-hairs to sample food first and if it contains glucose, they actually taste it as bitter, not sweet.

“They bounce back as if they got an electric shock. It is a very, very, very clear behaviour. They just absolutely refuse to ingest it,” said Schal, a professor of entomology.

“It is kind of like if you put something really bitter or really sour in your mouth and you immediately want to expel it.”

Filthy little creatures

Schal said this evolution came about “incredibly fast”, but noted that the development of antibiotic resistance in bacteria moves even faster.

It is hard to know what percentage of roaches have become averse to glucose. In this study, Schal and colleagues sampled various roaches from infestations in the United States, Russia, Puerto Rico and South Korea.

Of 19 populations studied, they found seven that contained glucose-averse roaches in their midst.

“This is a global phenomenon. It is not restricted to the US,” he said.

Professional exterminators have known about the issue for some time. The agrochemical industry has responded by altering baits to replace glucose with other attractants.

“We haven’t used any kind of trap that used sugar for years,” said Bob Kunst, president of Fischer Environmental, a pest control company in Louisiana.

Kunst, who was not involved in the study, described German cockroaches as “filthy little creatures” because they can carry salmonella.

Many of the major players in the pesticide industry keep their attractants under wraps for competitive purposes, but experts have a good idea of what works these days, he said.

“I would suggest certain high carbohydrate and base proteins are very popular with roaches,” Kunst said.

Roaches learn quickly

To illustrate how keen these newly evolved roaches are to survive and thrive without glucose, Schal and colleagues filmed the critters as they chose a fructose-based blob of jelly over one right next to it that contained glucose.

They also captured video of the roaches entirely avoiding a mound of jam containing glucose and flocking instead to a glob of peanut butter.

“We are showing that cockroaches can learn incredibly well. They can associate the punishment of tasting glucose with the smell of the bait.”

Schal said he hopes the agrochemical industry will take steps to more widely eliminate glucose from baits.

The German cockroach represents just one of about 5 000 species of roaches, and getting rid of the household pests all together would not be a bad thing, he said.

“As far as we know they do nothing for the ecological system outside of being pests in our homes, associated with us and possibly transmitting diseases and such,” he told AFP.

“In low-income housing it is a really severe problem. Cockroaches are responsible for a huge problem with allergic disease and asthma so it is really critically important to control them, to eliminate them.”

Other types of roaches in the world can be quite useful, from pollinating plants in the tropical rainforest to serving as a key food group for desert scorpions and shrews, he said.

– AFP