Who eats cockroaches is interesting to those who would like to defeat them with the help of natural enemies and pets. Do you know where cockroaches hide? Then read about how they are found by their natural exterminators and destroyed en masse.
Natural enemies of cockroaches are mammals, amphibians, wasps and other reptiles. For example, hedgehogs will eat cockroaches. Among those who like to eat cockroaches are geckos, skinks and other species of lizards, frogs, turtles, some species of birds and even rats and mice. Lizards, which are reptiles, are even known to hunt cockroaches when they encounter them and are eager for a snack.
Who eats cockroaches
You will be surprised to learn how many animals in nature eat cockroaches. This is a natural protein product for birds, rodents, and amphibians.
Even domestic animals, cats, dogs, do not hesitate to taste the insect.
To understand the importance and place in the chain, you need to know who feeds on them. Zoologists use any species as food: red, black, large Madagascar, American. The largest (length up to 9 cm) are the most delicious types, since they contain more meat, so they are juicier.
Appearance
Red cockroaches are typical representatives of their order. The general external similarity, as well as behavioral characteristics, are usually similar between all representatives of this type of insect, including the Madagascar and American pests, which some exotic connoisseurs like to breed as pets.
Cockroaches are found all over the world, but they have different names everywhere. In Russia, the common people call the red barbel a Prusak. There is a version that the pest received this name because of its connection with Germany and the war with Napoleon. It was then that these insects were brought to Russia through the territory of Prussia. In addition to apartments, insects can be found in fields. This species is called the Bernstein cockroach. The structure of the red cockroach also has similar features to other representatives of the cockroach suborder:
- They all have a cephalothorax, abdomen and head.
- The entire body, except the head, is hidden under the wings. The most interesting thing is that these pests cannot fly, but actively use their wings, for example, when falling from a height.
- In addition, insects are very tenacious - even radiation does not kill them.
- The antennae are a very important organ of the cockroach body. With their help, insects recognize the location of food supplies, and the antennae are also a means of communication between individuals. If at least one antennae is lost or injured for any reason, the barbel is deprived of the ability to navigate the surrounding world.
- As for size, the body of females is somewhat larger than that of males, but at the same time they have a shorter abdomen. Perhaps this is due to the fact that it is more convenient for females to bear offspring. An adult red barbel can reach a length of one to one and a half centimeters. Compared to other species, the red pest is a rather small species.
- Since ancient times, the so-called cerci, which are two tail-like processes, have been preserved on the body of red long-horned beetles. The color of all representatives of cockroaches is almost the same, with some exceptions. As a rule, the body has a brownish-red color.
- The insect weighs two tenths of a gram. Another relative of the red cockroach that feels great in the apartment is the black cockroach. Externally, they differ only in color. You can compare the red and black cockroaches from the photo.
In nature
The cockroach is not the main food for any animal; rather, it is a favorite delicacy, a delicacy eaten with pleasure. In nature, there are natural enemies that hunt them.
The peculiarity of these insects is their excellent survival rate. This is a practically endangered type of food; it is not afraid of changes in high and low temperatures, high humidity, drought, and radioactive radiation.
If a nuclear war occurs, cockroaches will remain alive, serving other animals and people as a source of food.
Temperature-induced pest control
If it is not possible to remove a small family of pests using chemical means due to your home environment, you can resort to a more cunning method. If you find living creatures in the winter, try to leave the apartment with your family for a few hours. Before leaving, turn off the heating pipes and open all the windows wide. Cockroaches cannot stand the cold and will run away to another place that is more comfortable for them. If the temperature in the apartment drops below 5 degrees, the pests will die along with the laid eggs. The freezing method has proven itself well in practice, but it is worth considering that the method has its drawbacks. At such a low temperature, an incident may occur with the heating system. It is also worth taking care of indoor plants in advance. It is in flower pots and soil that insects can hide and survive. In such an environment they will continue to reproduce and feel good
It is also important to understand that laid eggs may be in a place inaccessible to frost. You can try this method, if only to significantly reduce the number of adult individuals. The remaining cockroaches will have to be removed using a more effective method.
You can get rid of pests using proven home methods.
It is important to understand that the process is not easy, but the result will be worth it. Often, experienced housewives resort to traps using boric acid.
This composition destroys pests and even completely solves problems in a relatively short period of time.
Egg and potato. Boil a chicken egg hard. Remove the yolk and grind with 1 boiled potato tuber. Add 50 g to the ingredients. boric acid. Make small balls from the resulting mass. Dry the product near the heating device. After this, spread the bait throughout the apartment. Don't worry, this composition is absolutely safe for pets and people.
Sugar and flour. Use a container of a suitable size and combine granulated sugar, boric acid, and flour in it in equal quantities. Add a small amount of water to the ingredients. As a result, you should have a dense dough. Next, proceed according to the above scheme. Roll into balls and distribute around the perimeter of the apartment overnight.
Boric acid and water. You can resort to a simpler method. Dissolve a small amount of the chemical composition in running water and place the container in the kitchen near the sink
In this case, it is important to completely isolate the insects’ path to other sources of liquid. As a result, the cockroaches will be poisoned in the homemade drinking bowl.
Boric acid
Some housewives simply sprinkle a chemical composition on areas where pests live. The most common areas to include are vents, bathrooms, kitchens, sinks, trash cans, and baseboards.
Starch and vanillin. Combine 40 grams in a common container. boric acid, 4 gr. vanilla and 65 gr. starch, powdered sugar. Add a small amount of water to make a sticky paste. Apply the product to cardboard and place such a trap throughout the house. Pests cannot resist such a delicacy, and then die.
House plants. Indoor flowers are no less popular in the fight against insects. Some of these representatives emit a rather unpleasant odor for pests, and humans do not feel anything. This will require small bouquets. Hang decorations throughout the apartment in areas where cockroaches gather. Among such plants, eucalyptus, mint, elderberry, lemon balm, wild rosemary and chamomile are effective.
Citrus zest. This method cannot be accurately called effective, although experienced housewives claim otherwise. To get rid of the problem, just place citrus fruit zests throughout your apartment. The specific smell repels cockroaches, so they will not get to your products.
Getting rid of cockroaches is not as difficult as it might seem at first glance. To fix the problem, you should familiarize yourself with simple rules and safety precautions. If you don’t want to bother yourself, you should seek help from specialists. Otherwise, household products sold in the store will help you.
It is also worth paying attention to proven folk methods
Reptiles
The main enemies of cockroaches are reptiles. Some people, having discovered these insects at home, buy a lizard, an iguana, or a small snake. The lizard is especially fond of red-colored individuals, and is capable of eating them all in a few days until not a trace remains.
If there is no more food, it will begin to look for new sources and may move to the neighbors along the ventilation hole.
Birds
Surprisingly, birds love to eat cockroaches. Crows, sparrows, and domestic chickens will enjoy eating protein meat.
Songbirds living at home (robins, nightingales) do not refuse the marbled appearance and eat it.
Some owners have learned not to buy expensive food, but to grow it at home inside containers.
Rodents
Hamsters and rats in nature are among those rodents that are natural enemies of cockroaches and eat small insects. But at home, they are not in a hurry to eat it, because the insect can be dangerous.
It is a carrier of various diseases, and if neighbors have spread poison, they can bring the poison inside the cage with the rodent.
There have been cases when a cockroach calmly climbed inside a cage with a hamster, but the hamster did not touch it.
It makes no sense to buy insects specifically for domestic rodents; they have a different diet: cereals, grains, fruits or vegetables.
Insects
It is also interesting to know which insects pose a danger to the cockroach. For example, the emerald wasp. This is an opportunity for her to lay eggs. The wasp injects poison into the insect's body, paralyzes it, and then drags it inside the nest.
In the body of a paralyzed but still living cockroach, the wasp calmly lays its eggs; after a week, the larvae hatch and eat the cockroach from the inside. After another week, pupae are formed, from which the formed wasps subsequently hatch.
Thus, these insects eat cockroaches.
The dead insect will be happily dragged into the hole and ants.
They will cut it into small parts and transfer it to the nest for winter supplies, to feed the larvae and the queen.
Mammals
In nature, mammals also love cockroaches. For example, small monkeys will happily eat insects and treat their young ones.
By eating marbled cockroach meat, they replenish their body with nutrients; breeders include them in their daily diet.
But there is a peculiarity: despite the fact that these insects are not aggressive and timid, they can also eat mammals. If there is no alternative food for a long time, they attack a hibernating animal, since it does not pose a threat to them.
Do mice eat bed bugs?
Partially the answer to the question posed in the subtitle was already heard above when describing rodents in general. Yes, mice eat bedbugs, but insects are not the main part of their diet. Rather, they are eaten along with grains or grass, rather than as the main purpose.
If tasty and nutritious food is available, mice will always prefer it to unpleasant insects. Moreover, if we are talking about such representatives of arthropods as house bugs.
It is important to understand that mice themselves are also unpleasant neighbors for humans. There are several negative consequences of their stay in an apartment or house - transmission of pathogens of various diseases, destruction of food supplies, damage to electrical wiring, etc. Therefore, bringing mice into your home so that they can fight bedbugs is, to put it mildly, a futile task.
Pets
When red or black cockroaches appear in an apartment, you can notice how dogs or cats begin to hunt for them. Most do it for fun, pleasure, and bring it to show the owner.
But scientists say that cats love these insects, chitin is useful for them, especially after surgery (castration, sterilization).
Who else is eating:
- If there is a lizard living at home, you can let it out for a walk; it also feeds on domestic cockroaches.
- Spiders that live in every house hunt for insects. They weave a web and wait for one of them to fall into the net. The spider releases its poison with acid inside the body, which paralyzes and digests the insides, which later becomes an excellent meal. A dried cockroach from the inside becomes a bait for its other relatives.
- The domestic hedgehog also feeds on small insects. He hunts for them in corners and catches colonies.
As you can see, the list of those who like to eat unpleasant insects is quite extensive. Therefore, at home you can successfully fight them; to do this, it is enough to have pets.
Brief conclusions
Despite the presence of a large number of natural enemies of the house bug, a person should not expect real help in destroying the parasite. Even the most active animals that eat house bugs, such as cockroaches, spiders and amphibians, either rarely intersect with it or are no less unpleasant neighbors in their own right. The last argument applies, for example, to cockroaches, which can also cause a lot of trouble to humans.
Therefore, the simplest, most effective and realistic way to combat domestic bedbugs remains the same - contacting specialists. Proper selection of a suitable means of destroying the parasite in combination with properly carried out insecticidal treatment will rid your house or apartment of a harmful and dangerous insect that feeds on human blood.
From the above, the obvious and main conclusion of the article follows. You should not count on the help of the natural enemies of the bed bug. It is better to take the solution to the problem of its destruction into your own hands and put your plans into practice.
Human
Another part of the food chain who eats cockroaches is humans. People eat insects as a separate dish, with a side dish or sauce.
Grown in specialized insectariums and properly fed, they are harmless and tasty for humans. Expensive restaurants may recommend such an exotic dish.
Dietary protein meat is very popular in Asian and African countries. Eating cockroaches is quite common in third world countries. To prepare it, it is simply fried in a pan, with the addition of sauce, or eaten alive.
It is recommended to eat only large species: Madagascar, American, marbled.
Few people eat red and black cockroaches. This is explained by the fact that domestic insects feed mostly on waste, carrion, and can carry infections and diseases. Special conditions are created for growing large species.
Bed bugs eat people
Oddly enough, the human diet in some regions of the world includes bedbugs. Of course, we are not talking about a bed parasite, but about other, somewhat larger species of the insect suborder. Moreover, fried belostoma, which is a giant water bug, is considered a delicacy in restaurants in Japan and other Southeast Asian countries.
Obviously, the exact opposite situation occurs much more often, when bedbugs eat people, and not vice versa. Man in this case is not the top of the food chain, but only one of its intermediate links.
The question is often asked about whether bedbugs can bite a person to death. When answering this question, it is necessary to take into account several fundamentally important points. On the one hand, the bites themselves, even in large numbers, do not pose any excessive danger, other than very serious discomfort and unpleasant, and sometimes simply painful, sensations in the form of itching.
At the same time, they are often accompanied by two associated side effects. The first of them is a possible allergic reaction of a person, which can acquire extremely acute forms, and with numerous bites and lack of medical care, it is quite possible to lead to death.
The second unpleasant moment is that strong scratching of itchy areas is often accompanied by some kind of infection and the occurrence of various diseases, including blood poisoning. The end result in the form of death in such a situation is also quite likely, especially in the absence of prompt medical assistance.
