Cockroaches (Blattaria)
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Glasgow Museums has a collection of over 180 Cockroach specimens (Blattaria) which date from 1926 to the present.
This collection contains dried, pinned and card-mounted adult and immature insects as well as a few cockroach egg cases (ootheca). Most of the collection is foreign species, with several examples of specimens that have ‘hitchhiked’ to Scotland from foreign localities. Just under half the collection is from Trinidad, collected by Glasgow Museums former Keeper of Natural History, E. G. Hancock, during his field trips in the 1990s. These trips were conducted with the Glasgow University Zoological Society. Most were collected as part of his investigations into the invertebrates associated with bromeliads. Our British collection includes the American Cockroach (Periplaneta Americana), the Australian Cockroach (P. australasiae), the Oriental Cockroach (Blatta orientalis), the German Cockroach (Blatella germanica), the Dusky Cockroach (Ectobius lapponicus), the Tawny Cockroach (E. pallidus) and the Lesser Cockroach (E. panzeri).
About cockroaches
There are approximately 4,000 species of cockroach in the world. Only one percent of these are considered pests. Most live in the tropics, where they feast on decaying organic matter. Cockroaches are called ‘living fossils’, because they have hardly changed in the 280 million years they have been on the earth. - Broader term
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