Cockroach homepage

Cockroaches

I like cockroaches because they are practically indestructible, social and fairly clever, but they don’t seem to need their brain very much! Even if you chop their head off they can survive for two weeks before dying of dehydration – I like that fact! Cockroaches have been around for a very long time: 400 million years, so cockroaches and fossils are linked together in time.

I have written some cockroach care sheets on Madagascan hissing cockroaches, Gromphadorhina oblonganota and Death's head cockroaches, Blaberus craniifer.

I recently wrote an article for my school annual magazine, to explain why I write about cockroaches. You can read it here.

I was interviewed for an article about bug collecting which was published in The Times. You can read a copy of it here. They sent a photographer who took lots of cool photos of me and my roaches: see them here.

Click here for my first cockroach article, which was published in the Amateur Entomological Society's Bug Club Magazine in September 2007. It won the 2007-8 Gardiner Award for the best article from under nine year-olds. Here is a photo of me receiving my award from AES President Mike Majerus at the Natural History Museum in London.

Click here for my article on the Blattodea Culture Group 2008 meeting, which was published in the Amateur Entomological Society's Bulletin in June 2008.

Click here for my article on my presentation to the Amateur Entomological Society's Annual General Meeting and Members' Day, in April 2008. It was published in the Amateur Entomological Society's Bug Club Magazine in June 2008.

Here is a picture of me giving my talk.

I was asked to give a talk at the Quekett Microscopy Club's Young Scientist Day, at the Natural History Museum, and I gave a presentation in February 2009 titled 'Roaches in Focus: Physical characteristics of social behaviour'. It was about how, if we look closely enough, we can tell whether a roach is social or not, by its physical characteristics or attributes.

During 2008-9 I conducted a series of interviews with the general title 'Working in Entomology', which won the Gardiner Award from the Amateur Entomological Society for age 9 and over. You can read the interview articles here. As a result, I was able to give a second talk to the AES AGM, this time in the main lecture theatre at the University of Cambridge Department of Zoology. My presentation followed the days' theme of evolution and was titled The co-evolution of social and physical characteristics in the Madagascan Hissing Cockroach.

Here is a picture of me at Zoology Department giving my lecture.

I was able to meet Brian Gardiner (who the award was named after) afterwards and here is a picture: