Who's bugging who?

Courtesy of Ten Speed Press David George Gordon

"For me it was a lot of fun because in the past I've written about things like bald eagles, and orca whales, and seals - well, everybody knows those are wonderful creatures," he says. "There isn't a lot of selling to do there, and maybe the educational va lue of telling people that bald eagles are really wonderful is a little less, too. It was fun for me to be able show people that both cockroaches and slugs have nifty things going on, too ... that they're just as charismatic."

Gordon is a kind of public relations worker for the icky. With the evangelical zeal of a preacher during a revival meeting, he lays out a clear and compelling case for the cockroach's hidden elegance and beauty. The Complete Cockroach... A Comprehensive G uide to the Most Despised (and least understood) Creature on Earth is both a book and a multimedia show touring through town this evening. Gordon promises a complete intellectual dissection of the cockroach: cockroach biology, cockroach behavior, cockroac h control and the cockroach's influence on popular culture. I imagine that the show will be something of a rollercoaster ride through the world of the roach. Roaches are Gordon's passion, and he spoke with great animation about some common myths and facts of the cockroach's life and times.

Wildcat: Are cockroaches regarded differently in other cultures?

David George Gordon:We Americans are very fond of spraying things, and I think Europeans as well are more into being control freaks. If you go to Africa or South America where cockroaches are just a way of life, people don't get all bent out of sha pe when one runs across a table.

WC: Well, there are pretty serious health risks involved ...

DG: That's one of the things I find interesting when doing my work. Now, I will admit that cockroaches in really large numbers can give people allergies and asthma-like reactions. Kids living in the inner city - where they're already living in really crowded conditions to begin with, and they're sharing their homes with tens of thousands of roaches - can get all sorts of serious allergic reactions. But the whole thing about cockroaches transmitting diseases has never really been proven. They're known to carry to bacteria and viruses - I don't want to say that they're completely clean - but nobody has been able to convict them, as it were, of taking those bacteria and passing them on to other life forms.

WC: But let's say we did want to get rid of them - what's the best non-pesticide method?

DG: Well, in my book I go through a whole arsenal starting out with the most environmentally friendly ways, which include things like using a hedgehog ... which is what the old Victorian English used to do, put a hedgehog in the kitchen.

More recently, there's kind of a craze among apartment dwellers to keep lizards, they're called geckos, to eat the cockroaches in their homes. There are those kind of things, but probably the first step is to make the environment less comfortable for pest species. That means making sure that you're not leaving food out for them, even in things like pet bowls.

There are lots of powders you can use, that are mildly toxic, but they're still, you know ... poisons. There's also state-of-the-art technology that they've developed now - I think the most effective one is called a "Bait Station."

WC: A bait station?

DG: It's a trap which brings the cockroach into this little thing, and he nibbles on this "bait," which has a minute quantity of poison on it. Over time it builds up and offs the cockroach. Cockroaches are hard to poison because they taste everythi ng before they eat.

WC: How did they determine that roaches taste things?

DG: They have taste buds and they actually take a little nibble before they actually swallow anything.

WC: So you've really spent a long time looking at roaches, then.

DG: That's right, a couple of years.

WC: How intelligent are they?

DG: Well, they've shown in experiments that cockroaches can be taught to run mazes - like the little white mice do. Intelligence is always a hard question to answer; it's hard for us to figure out how relatively intelligent we are even with other p eople. But I think one thing is that they're incredibly in tune with the environment. They can detect the minutest things: a few molecules of a chemical in the air is enough to lead them to their mate.

WC: But can they really survive a nuclear war?

DG: That's actually the last essay in book, because almost every non-scientist I talk to asks that question. It's a great urban legend. I think that it's not true, and I talked to a guy who did a lot of radiation work on cockroaches to figure this out. Cockroaches can withstand high levels of radiation, way higher than people, but lots of animals can, including goldfish. But we don't get into "after the nuclear attack, all that'll be left are goldfish" ... so it's kind of a shock thing. A fair thin g to remember is that the legend probably started during the '50s, and back then we were using small bombs.

WC: So now with our bigger bombs ...

DG: That was also before people started thinking about things like nuclear winter. So, even if they withstood the nuclear blast, when suddenly the whole planet was plunged into another ice age because of the debris cloud, that would finish them off right there.

WC: That's sort of reassuring somehow ... Switching gears for a second, how has the popular perception of cockroaches changed over the years?

DG: Well, there's always been this thing about cockroaches that I find really interesting - they're sort of symbols of anti-heroes. If you went out today and started looking at skateboard art and punker stuff, you'd probably find lots of cockroach stuff.

WC: Cockroaches and aliens...

DG: Yeah, right. They're a symbol of something that's gross and almost impossible to get rid of, and almost heroic in its ability to stand up to "The Man."

"The Compleat Cockroach" multimedia experience comes to The Heidelberg Club, 4606 E. Pima at 7:30 this evening. Admission is free and all profits from sales will benefit the Sonoran Arthropod Studies Institute. Call 883-3945 for details.