Will We Ever... Get Rid Of Cockroaches?

Not likely. we've deployed everything from sex hormones to roach-killing wasps in our billion-dollar war against the cockroach, and we haven't made much of a dent. Over the past decade, better bait and smarter tactics have knocked the roach from first to third on the household-pest hit parade (after ants and termites), but there are still a lot more of them than us.

The problem is that after 350 million years of evolution, your kitchen-variety cockroach is exquisitely designed for survival. A single female German cockroach (the most prolific of the seven major pest species) generates 35,000 descendants a year on...

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