From Alan Salzberg's excellent newsletter, HerpDigest:
Cockroach farming, anyone?
Lizards' Treat A Recipe For Foreign Invasion (Cockroaches)
By Christine Evans, Palm Beach Post Staff Writer, Friday, November 21, 2008
People are feeding exotic cockroaches to their giant pet lizards. This is not a good thing.
That's the latest from the bizarre world of entomology, where, up at the University of Florida, a renowned cockroach expert dropped a bit of a bomb in the bug world when he and a colleague published a paper that said, basically, that the 3-inch-long Madagascar hissing roach could soon be living in your kitchen cabinets.
If you doubt the scenario - which, in full, involves a bearded dragon lizard, a timely phone call, a roadside rescue and an entrepreneurial group of cockroach farmers who sell the crunchy little critters via Internet - you might want to flip through the September/October issue of Florida Pest Pro magazine.
There you will learn that four types of exotic cockroaches - the Madagascar, the Turkistan, the orange spotted and the lobster - are practically leaping off the Web to the plates of hungry lizards everywhere, including, presumably, here.
"People are sharing their cockroaches with other people all over the place," says an incredulous Philip Koehler, the UF entomologist who coauthored the Pest Pro piece with colleague Roberto Pereira. "There's kind of an underground trade. I had no idea."
Neither did some pest controllers, until Koehler, an expert of some note who once appeared on Nightline with Ted Koppel to discuss the discovery of the Asian cockroach near the Port of Tampa, enlightened them.
The article, which drew dozens of press inquiries, describes the global trek of the Turkistan, which apparently has set up a nice little home for itself in the American Southwest, after arriving, it is thought, on the gear of soldiers returning from the Middle East. The Turk since has become one of the most popular lizard foods, and the authors warn pest companies to be on the lookout for little Houdini roaches who escape before going down a lizard's gullet.
What does all this mean?
"You don't want an invasive species or a non-native species of any sort coming into the state," says Liz Compton, a spokeswoman for the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services. "And obviously, we don't want more cockroaches."
The problem, Koehler says, is that people who keep lizards as pets have figured out that roaches provide a relatively cheap, easy and un-smelly way to feed them. Crickets used to be popular pet-lizard food, "but crickets are noisy. People don't like them chirping about in their homes."
Roaches, on the other hand, are quiet, unless they're hissing, as a Madagascar is prone to do when angry. "It thinks it's a snake."
Koehler and other insect experts are careful to point out that no official sighting of any of the four exotic species in question is on record in Florida - yet. It could be just a matter of time, "and then we have a problem ... because roaches can be mechanical vectors of disease. If they make it into your house, they might climb onto your hamburger meat."
Importing roaches to the state without a permit is illegal, but as Compton points out, "the packaging doesn't exactly say 'exotic roaches inside,' so we can't tell when it's coming or how many. Short of going door to door, there's not much we can do."
In other words, a hungry lizard's meal is only a Google away.
This summer, as Koehler was typing up his Pest Pro piece, the phone rang.
"I was just thinking it would be really nice to have a picture of a bearded dragon lizard to go with the article when somebody called to say he found a bearded dragon by the side of the road and it was hungry.
"Never in my 33 years here have I heard from somebody who had a hungry bearded dragon, so I told him to come over and we took the dragon's picture and then we gave him a meal of crickets and cockroaches."
Cockroaches? "Nothing exotic, of course." American-style.
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