New York City Cockroaches usually stay in their own neighborhood and tend to segregate themselves with the same "race."
"Once they move in, they don't leave," Mark Stoeckle, a senior research associate at Rockefeller University, referring to results from the National Cockroach Project, told the Wall Street Journal. "This is a window into cockroach society and it is very much like our own."
The researchers have found that there are significant genetic differences between cockroaches on the Upper East Side and the Upper West Side.
Dr. Stoeckle has been asking people to send him dead roach donations by mail for the past year, and has gotten quite a few. He has analyzed over 125 specimens from around the country, but most hailed from New York, which is notorious for its invasive roach population.
The National Cockroach Project's web page gives detailed instructions on how to mail the dead insects. "What do you get?" the website asked. "Thrill of scientific discovery with DNA, Cool topic to talk about with friends, [and] DNA sequences you can analyze to study evolution," it answers.
"To be honest, I was really grossed out by this at first," Joyce Xia, a 17-year-old Hunter College High School student who worked on Dr. Stoeckle's team, told the Wall Street Journal. "But, after a while, you get over it."
The various "races" of cockroaches don't seem to have behavioral or physical appearances, but the difference lies in the genetics. Researchers have found 4,600 breeds of cockroaches but there are believed to thousands more waiting to be discovered.
The insects are popular research subjects partially because of their abundance and the strong negative feelings people have towards them.
""They say a lot about how we live and interact with the environment around us," Sergios-Orestis Kolokotronis, an assistant professor of biology at Fordham University, told the Wall Street Journal."In an urban area, they reflect and magnify our own behavior."
