I remember reading this cockroach FAQ by this entomologist who was like "haha yes, though I've given my life over to the study...
I remember reading this cockroach FAQ by this entomologist who was like “haha yes, though I’ve given my life over to the study of these creatures, I totally accept that you kill them on sight and would exterminate them all if you could!”
And maintained a cheerful tone throughout, except when it got to like “Gee Dr. Insect, if ants are strong enough to lift multiples of their body weight, how much can a cockroach lift?”
And he’s like “That’s a stupid question, I am so tired of that question, cockroaches don’t even have a lifting and carrying behavior so how would we even test that, you idiot, you absolute moron.”
Was this the FAQ? http://www.bio.umass.edu/biology/kunkel/cockroach_faq.html
Yeah I think so
Q60: Elizabeth Palmer asks:
How much weight can a cockroach carry? For instance, an ant can carry it’s own weight…
Ans: Liz,
That saying about the ant sounds just as offhand as what I might give for the cockroach, but for an important difference: The ant is a forager which is designed to find and carry objects back to its colony nest. Carrying things has a meaning for ants based on their innate behavior.
The cockroach does not move things more than a few millimeters when it lifts things that it is nibbling while eating or tasting. Therefore the carrying question is meaningless in most situations. Cockroaches were not designed to carry foreign objects around.
The ant can probably carry things twice its weight. … This is a perfect question for an undergraduate lab, but not particularly interesting to an insect physiologist. It would engage the student in trying to get the cockroach and ant to carry something. The student would hopefully learn that the ant instinctively carries things off and the cockroach does not. This exercise would teach that the posing of a logical experimental question is an important step in doing research.
A close relative of the cockroach is the preying mantis which catches and lifts other insects to eat them. The females will even catch and eat the male after she mates with him. The male in mating with the female, jumps on its back and is carried around during the mating process. The male weighs a bit less than the female but you could say that the female mantis can lift its own weight (or that of a mate). In this case the female does carry the male on her back while mating, then she grabs him and eats him on the spot, usually without carrying him any further.
Similarly the other close relative of the cockroach, the termite, is a social insect which lives in a nest but it does not go foraging and bring back large objects the way that an ant does. The termite can forage for bits of wood and does lift bits of wet saliva soaked wood in order to extend its nest, often building huge structures in Africa, or, more close to home, tunnels from house siding across foundation to ground. Carrying of this building material is essential to survival for these termites.
The cockroach female does not carry the male on her back during the mating process as the mantid and many other insects do, they mate tail to tail with no carrying involved. So, you need to create a question about cockroaches that has meaning. A carrying question about a cockroach is not meaningful, unless you could create a situation in which it needs to carry something. When a group of cockroaches is very hungry I have observed them competing for food. Occasionally I have seen a cockroach drag a piece of food off to nibble on it without being harassed by close neighbors. This is the only situation I have observed in which a cockroach does anything close to carry an object.
Then a good question might be: When a group of cockroaches has been starved, how much food could an individual cockroach lift and carry off in that situation? I do not know the answer.