From the city that never sleeps, just in time for winter holiday season comes the perfect gift for the person who has everything -- a species of cockroach that has just appeared in New York and -- oh, joy! -- can withstand harsh cold.
Finding a new cockroach in New York is a bit like bringing coals to Newcastle or trying to out-twerk Miley Cyrus. After all, it is not like there is a shortage of cockroaches in New York, or, indeed, in any urban or suburban area.
Though it is has never been an official contestant on “Survivor,” the insect is affectionately known for its hardiness and its well-earned reputation for an ability to live in the worst of conditions, including scant food or even no air for a time. It is said that if humanity succeeds in destroying itself in a nuclear holocaust, the roaches will manage to carry on -- though, to be fair, there is little empirical evidence for that.
But there is observational evidence for the hardiness of the roach species, Periplaneta japonica, which is well entrenched in Asia but whose presence has never been confirmed in the United States -- until now.
In a paper for the Journal of Economic Entomology, Rutgers University insect biologists Jessica Ware and Dominic Evangelista write of confirming the presence of the Asian cockroach, first spotted in 2012 by an exterminator working on the High Line, Manhattan’s magnificent urban park, that reclaimed the former elevated spur of the New York Central Railroad on the West Side.