What does a cockroach Prusak look like?

The Prusak cockroach got its name as a result of the erroneous opinion that he arrived from Prussia - present-day Germany. The Germans, in turn, are convinced that the homeland of the red insect is Russia. Neither of them is right, since the long-necked alien began his victorious march across the continents from Central Asia, where he is found in the wild today.

The appearance of the Prusak

An adult insect is an imago; it has an elongated, flattened in the horizontal plane light brown body. On the upper part of the cephalothorax, two dark stripes are clearly visible, ending at the transition to the abdomen. You can get more visual information about what a cockroach Prusak looks like in the photo below.

The eyes are large, faceted, located on the sides of the head. There is also a pair of long sensitive antennae and six nimble, adapted for quick running legs.

The wings that cover the back of the insect are not able to lift it into the air, however, if it falls from the wall, the cockroach can plan for a short time. In males, they do not reach the edge of the rear pointed part of the body. The female abdomen is rounded and completely covered by them.

Larvae, or nymphs, are very similar in appearance to an adult insect and differ only in size and lack of wings. Before acquiring them, the cockroach drops its skin 6 times, increasing in size after each molt.

Immediately after getting rid of the old cover, the body of the insect is soft and tender, light, sometimes even white. As it hardens, it acquires a dark color, slightly more saturated than that of adults.

When looking at the insect from the side, it is clear that most of its body is occupied by a voluminous, gluttonous abdomen, divided into segments.

Nymphs who have just dropped their chitin skin look somewhat unusual due to their light color. Sometimes, out of ignorance, they are ranked as a new type of cockroach, which supposedly appeared in the process of mutation.

Interesting fact! With a severed head, a cockroach can live more than 10 days and die of thirst. In the absence of the brain, the ganglion nodes, which are located throughout the body of the insect, take on the control function.

Physiology features

The red cockroach has an incomplete development cycle. The larva hatched from an egg goes through several stages of molting, during which it grows in size and becomes more and more like an adult insect.

The period of "growing up" takes about 2 months. At the end of which the insect is able to reproduce. After mating, the female lays eggs in a reminiscent of a leathery pouch - a capsule called ooteka. She wears it until the very moment larvae appear on her body.

Up to 40 larvae can be in one ooteca. In total, the female lays 4-9 such bags in her entire life.

Life span red cockroaches small, only 20-30 weeks, however, due to their fertility and rapid development, they are capable of capturing the entire house in a short time.

These impudent invaders feed on everything from which they are able to gnaw off a piece. It can be food debris dropped by a person, paper, cloth, wallpaper glue and even soap.They are not able to bite painfully, due to the small size of their oral apparatus, however, to bite off a small piece of keratinized skin from a person is easy.

The chitinous cover of the Prusak cockroach is not able to protect it from the danger of being crushed, so they prefer to leave their shelters under cover of night. In the daytime, they hide under baseboards, beds, sofas, in furniture, in all kinds of slots and holes where they can squeeze their flat body.

Advice! Cockroaches do not tolerate the lack of moisture, although they can live more than a month without food. Therefore, to make it difficult for them to live in your apartment, block all access to water for them - repair current taps, wipe the kitchen sink for the night.

A bit about the history of the spread of cockroaches

Having gotten from the wild to a person’s home, red cockroaches quickly adapted to their home lifestyle. The houses of people became for them a place of plenty, where everything was edible, including the owner himself.

In European cities, the cockroach Prusak got used to it so well that it squeezed a long-time inhabitant of human dwellings - black cockroach. A slow relative was noticeably inferior to him in the speed of development, and he scattered his eggs anywhere, not caring about the fate of the offspring. This was used by the red invaders, eating the clutches of their relatives.

Traveling with people, the Prussians spread almost all over the world, avoiding only regions too cold for them. Currently, they can be found in almost all corners of our planet.

How to get rid of cockroaches, and what means against them exist, you will learn from this video: