A Come-On With a Punch

It’s not that anyone cottons to cockroaches. They are disgusting creatures responsible for spreading disease and filth, somehow having evaded 200 million years of insect evolution and all human efforts to extinguish their existence. But there’s something vaguely disconcerting about news in the journal Science that scientists have copied the chemical emitted by female German cockroaches to attract males when it’s time for the voodoo that males and females do do to procreate.

These researchers have invested decades developing a new form of betrayal between the sexes. It’s important because each breeding season a female cockroach can produce 350,000 unbeloved little ones. What the humans did do is methodically dissect female German cockroaches, the most prevalent species. They sought the gland that produces the pheromone that makes female roaches seem sexy. Imagine seeking an unlabeled gland in a half-inch bug. They then got the glands from 15,000 other female cockroaches; all had to be virgins, by the way. Imagine ensuring that. Many lie.

Using gas chromatographs, the humans isolated the pheromone’s chemicals one by one. Then using disembodied cockroach antennae connected to instruments by wires, they determined which chemical produced the hot-to-trot reaction in 60% of male cockroaches. Then scientists analyzed the chemical’s contents, built a fake copy and called it, of course, blattelaquinone.

Put a dab of that stuff behind the antennae or on the four wrists of a female cockroach and -- watch out! -- here come the guys in ardent droves. On average, it took under nine seconds for them to arrive from 22 inches away, which is like around the corner in human terms. Even starving cockroaches (how would you ascertain that, by the way?) forsook peanut butter to respond to the come-hither signal.

Alas, in contemplated commercial applications, the males will not find eager mates with the equivalent of cockroach cleavage. They will find poisoned food that, it is hoped, they will consume and take home to the nest before dying unrequited to become part of a lethal food chain.

Obviously, human males could never be romantically manipulated by the perfume of flowers, the sound of a beer can opening or some culinary pheromone like popcorn or sizzling meat. So there’s no human application. But with 40% of male cockroaches oblivious to the pheromone, what’s next? Little vasectomies? A morning-after pill? Most effective might be tiny lozenges that give female cockroaches a headache.