Cockroaches a delightful pest and a fascinating infestation

Cockroaches+a+delightful+pest+and+a+fascinating+infestation

Written By Laura Byko, Co-Opinions Editor

If you’ve been on campus lately, you may have noticed we have some visitors. That’s right: Cockroaches have been spotted in Lawrence Hall, even across the hall from the Globe’s own newsroom.

This was originally going to be a piece humorously comparing Donald Trump to a cockroach and defenses of him to defenses of cockroaches, using the hook of an on-campus infestation to give some Point Park specificity to a comment on the national political discourse.

It was going to go something like this: “Although a lot of people have an immediate distaste for cockroaches, they should put aside their feelings and give the cockroaches a chance to settle into their new homes and create meaningful change.

Just because the pests have a pattern of behavior doesn’t mean we should assume that the pattern will continue on its well-established path.”

But after spending some time on the Wikipedia page for cockroaches, I have come to the conclusion that comparing cockroaches to Donald Trump would be insulting to the bugs, which are, as it turns out, fascinating little critters!

Did you know that cockroaches are social animals? I didn’t! They make decisions about where to travel for food as a group, collectively. They even have social structures and different personalities. How neat is that?

Cockroaches as a species are around 320 million years old. These guys outlived the dinosaurs. Stop for a minute and think about that.

As the planet has spun and spun, as the continents have drifted apart, as tides have risen and fallen, as humans have emerged and begun their journeys of loving and killing and hope and terror, as the world changes in ways violent and not, cockroaches have stuck around by utilizing their hypereffective survival strategy of minding their own business.

Donald Trump is only 70. The Western Black Rhinoceros was declared extinct in 2011, but it’s mostly sad and not at all impressive that Donald Trump outlived it because it went extinct after decades of poaching.

Trump never survived a meteor’s collision with Earth and the subsequent atmospheric changes, carving out a space for himself in the annals of the planet’s long history.

There is an entire subsection of the Wikipedia page devoted to “Hardiness.” Hardiness! They can survive for 45 minutes without air and for a month without food. Even decapitation can’t get these guys down, at least for a few hours.

That’s amazing.

And if their physical appearance is unsettling to you, you at least have to acknowledge they are insanely good at staying alive.

Donald Trump’s Wikipedia page has a subsection devoted to “Fringe theories.” Another one is called “Controversy involving the Pope.” One of his listed “awards and accolades” is his Golden Raspberry for Worst Supporting Actor for his role in the 1989 film “Ghosts Can’t Do It.”

The Wikipedia page for cockroaches does note, however, that the widely-held idea that cockroaches would be able to survive a nuclear war in which all of humanity died isn’t quite true.

They have a much higher tolerance for radiation than humans, but it’s not notably higher than that of a fruit fly. Radioactive fallout would be harmful to the noble cockroach.

So Donald Trump, with his newfound access to the United States’ nuclear arsenal, could conceivably ruin cockroaches, which I have now realized are very cool.

Nothing is safe in a Trump presidency, not even cockroaches, my new best friends.

I would like to apologize to the cockroach community for almost using them as a part of a rhetorical tool implying they are the same as Donald Trump.

But if anything can make it through the next four years, they can.