How is the fact that cockroaches can survive a nuclear holocaust true??? How can that happen???
In: Other
Well, they probably wouldn’t survive the actual blast of the nuclear weapon.
Assuming the roaches down the street from ground zero survive, the species has a good chance of surviving. Roaches eat anything not nailed down: food scraps, fecal matter, dead roaches, plaster, wood, you name it, roaches will eat it. Roaches are incredibly fertile and reproduce quickly. Within a couple of weeks of hatching cockroaches are ready to start having young.
When I say roaches reproduce quickly, I mean it. A single female German cockroach can have 350 off spring over twenty weeks. And by that time generation two and three (and possibly four) are up and rolling. In roach positive conditions, starting from a single breeding pair, you could have 40,000-60,000 roaches within six months. And the numbers will only continue to grow as long as there is food and water.
Plus the females can produce asexually if desperate. The species is almost impossible to eradicate.
Roaches reproduce fast enough that anything that doesn’t kill them, breeds a roach that is resistant to that poison. And any roaches that does die doesn’t contribute to the next round of roaches next week. Darwinian survival of the fittest has an updated roach breed every week. And the first roach that is even moderately resistant to nuclear fall out will reproduce faster than the other breeds. A couple years later, and a hundred generations, I could see a radiation resistant roach hanging around blast sites.
Edit-a couple of typos.
I assume you are confused because you are imagining cockroaches surviving a direct hit from a nuke. They don’t, they burn up like everything else.
It is not the blast that is the real danger however, it is the radiation that spreads all over and ends the human race.
Cockroaches can survive high levels of radiation that people cannot. They are not alone, there are lots species out there that can survive way more radiation than a person. In reality cockroaches are not even all that resistant to radiation compared to other insects.
Its just one of those things people say a lot but has no real meaning to it. In a nuclear war, most humans would survive too. It would probably kill less than 1 billion people directly.
That having been said, the idea is based on cockroaches being much more resistant to gamma radiation and that living underground would also improve the chances.
But in the end, any nuclear event strong enough to kill everyone would also kill cockroaches. Fruit Flies are much more likely to survive.
Latest Answers