Subject: Cockroach??
Geographic location of the bug: North Jersey
Date: 12/13/2017
Time: 10:34 PM EDT
Found this staring at when I opened my pantry. Found another dead one in the upstairs bathroom tub that is never used
How you want your letter signed: Mary
Hi Mary,
This certainly is a Cockroach, and the image is too blurry to be certain, but it looks to us like a German Cockroach, a species that frequently infests homes.
Thank you so much, I think. : o
We’ve been in this house for over 10 years, is there a reason I am just seeing them (2 so far, one alive one dead) now? We did have our basement remediated for mold and they used something called Tim-Bor to treat the wood. Does it mean they’ve been in our house all this time? I’m disgusted to say the least.
We’ve been in this house for over 10 years, is there a reason I am just seeing them (2 so far, one alive one dead) now? We did have our basement remediated for mold and they used something called Tim-Bor to treat the wood. Does it mean they’ve been in our house all this time? I’m disgusted to say the least.
German Cockroaches have adapted to living near humans and have benefitted from cohabitation, especially because of the food we provide for them. You may have introduced Cockroaches to your home in a purse taken to a restaurant, in a brown bag brought home from the grocery, or even in a basket taken to a laundromat.
Um, wait!
“The German cockroach is best identified by small size and two parallel lines running from back of head to wings”. http://ento.psu.edu/extension/factsheets/german-cockroaches
There are no stripes on this one’s pronotum!
I looked through bugguide’s section on common house roaches (on the Order Blattodea page), and it looks like none of them. My first thought was that it was a small, harmless forest/garden ectobiid which had wandered into the house, but a quick scan through harmless ectobiids on bugguide didn’t find any obvious matches. Of course, it is entirely possible that the pronotal stripes were blurred out by the poor lighting of the photo, but I would be very very cautious before assuming there is an infestation.
Cheers
Thanks AlexW, extreme entomophile.
We could not detect stripes either. The only reason we even suggested an infestation is that two individuals were found. We never suggested fumigation or any drastic measures, but being vigilant to the potential presence of other Cockroaches could help prevent a serious infestation.