Dubias clicking?

Andee

Andee

Chameleon Enthusiast
Has anyone else heard their dubia roaches click? I only hear it when I am collecting them and sending out a breeder colony. I assume it's only a sound adults can make, not sure if it's males or females or both who make it. I assume they make the sound when distressed? Idk for sure though. I try to make the shipping process as least stressful as possible but I know it's stressful no matter what I do...
 
I never noticed it myself. I'll have to pay more attention to them. I usually only get a few out at a time though.
 
Nope, never heard anything like that. I sold about 400 juvies and adults this past weekend and all I heard was scurrying as I was digging through my colony.
 
I heard it when you sent me those roaches! It must be a defensive mechanism? Confuse the predator and try to make a run for it... It was very interesting, indeed, and very audible!
 
Sue asks:
... In one of (your) FAQs, someone asked about roaches making sounds, and you replied that to the best of your knowledge the (pest species) didn't communicate through sounds.
However, one thing I noted at one point when my home was suffering a rather bad infestation of American roaches is that at night I would hear a clicking sound, very similar to the sound made when a person snaps a fingernail and thumbnail together. If I made this snapping noise with my fingernails, I'd get a chorus of "replies." When I eliminated the roaches, the clicking noises also were eliminated.
So although the evidence is a bit circumstantial, I believe that the American roach actually communicates via this clicking sound, perhaps a mating call?

Ans: Sue,
Good observation! That sound might fall within the realm of stridulation which I mentioned about some species of cockroach. One might ask how stridulation developed evolutionarily and it might have started with a few clicks of the roach wings or limbs against one another. Your experiment with inducing them to click is particularly telling. I would think that rather than mating, which has been studied fairly thoroughly, that the clicking might be a warning that is transmitted through the roach world. In certain species of the closely related termites the large headed soldiers do head-knocking behavior in their wooden galleries, banging their little heads against the wooden walls which sends an alarm signal to the rest of the colony.
Alarm-signal evidence in cockroaches would be an important finding. It would be further evidence of a social structure beyond mating much as white-tailed deer flash their tails or turkeys gobble a warning to fellow turkeys when danger arises. You may not be willing to recreate the environment in which the roaches were clicking and could respond to your nail-snaps but that would be necessary in order to design experiments to test your 'communication hypothesis'. Someone may read this in my FAQ and do just that. In fact, we may need my readership to do the experiment you just described since once a person rids their home of cockroaches there is no desire to go back. Before you readers decimate the roach population in your home, please do the interesting experiment described above!

@kinyonga
 
I will have to go out into my bin in a few moments and try it, I have a larger colony, at the moment my numbers are lower than usual (plan to put ordering on hold for insects so my colonies stabilize a smidge again) my adults are down from 1000, to about 500-600 and I am a bit too low on males for my liking. But I have tons of nymphs so excited to see the outcome
 
Yeah I am not surprised, roaches are some of the smartest insects. They supposedly use them in research and the army for something. (I believe the research more than the army but who knows XD) for research they do things like they do with rats to test intelligence.

I had a couple female dubias from the beginning part of my colony, they died about a year or so ago, they lived to be 2.5 years old. But both of them had some very noticeable scars/marking that made them easy to tell apart, and also they were some of my favorites. One of them I kept in isolation for a while, while she received emergency care, I had too many males (super over population), and this specific female got roughed up, she got her wing case chewed up so bad that the flesh beneath her actual exo skeleton was exposed. So she spent a month or so being doted upon and became very sweet. Even when I placed her back into my colony (after everything with ratios had been sorted) she stayed friendly. Loved her to pieces, it broke my heart to find her dead later. But she couldn't live forever.
 
Dang. Leave it to a chameleon forum to make you get teary-eyed over some cockroaches :,( I definitely have a couple of female roaches that I recognize it my ginormous colony, and for whatever reason I'd don't sell or feed off the recognizable ones.

I had the same problem with a couple of pet hissers when I was a kid, too, kinyonga.

Andee, when you say your roach stayed sweet, what does that mean?
 
I will try the clicking experiment this weekend but I will not allow my house to become infested even in the name of science.:eek:
 
Yup, I hear them make an array of sounds! I realy think they communicate! I have taken a little chunk of food and given it to one of them, without letting go of the food! The roach would then start making sounds. Within moments a croud of roaches are there to get some too, or to help! Amazing!
 
RedMountainHome said:
Dang. Leave it to a chameleon forum to make you get teary-eyed over some cockroaches :,( I definitely have a couple of female roaches that I recognize it my ginormous colony, and for whatever reason I'd don't sell or feed off the recognizable ones.

I had the same problem with a couple of pet hissers when I was a kid, too, kinyonga.

Andee, when you say your roach stayed sweet, what does that mean?
Click to expand...

She wasn't skittish at all, wouldn't try to avoid being picked up. She never vomited on me unless squeezed too hard on accident. Most of my other roaches (especially new nymphs or adult males) will vomit with a particular smell to it as a defense mechanism. She also was readily curious compared to my other roaches. She was always first to the food because she never ran.
 
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