Roaches don’t have thumbs.
Quite the contrary; we’re really hard prey. Even if an animal does manage to take down a human that’s separated from tools long enough, other humans will then very efficiently hunt down and kill that animal before it can pass down (genetically or behavorially) its taste for humans. Roaches don’t do that; they just breed more to replace their fallen.
The joke was intended to be more along the lines that we once were prey but we evolved to being at the very top of the food chain. There was a time on earth humans were easy prey for a lot of creatures that no longer exist. The ability to use tools among other things gave us not only handy weapons, but the ability to build civilization as we know it - -schools and universities, message boards, and so forth. We’re at the very top of the food chain, roaches almost at the very bottom. One can’t simply reason that humans could be common prey because roaches are common prey due to their enduring ability to survive. We have enduring abilities to survive for very different reasons. All that, from just “Roaches don’t have thumbs”
I do.
My cat catches and eats roaches all the time. Problem is she’ll often fall for the roach’s natural defense mechanism: playing dead. She’ll let the thing out of her mouth, assuming it’s dead, only for it to reveal it was playing possum, spring to life and start skittering around again. Disgusting, but entertaining to watch.
You just have to be patient before they get bored of their little plaything, and go in for the kill. Often times she does it when I’m not looking…she doesn’t like me to see her eat. Or, if you do get impatient, wait for the cat to tire the thing out then grab a tissue, wad it up over the exhausted and stomped-upon little demon and then flush it down the toilet.
Oh and by “little demon” I meant the cockroach, not the cat.
Thank goodness you clarified. I was concerned about your plumbing.
No, fortunately all the cat hair is left on the SURFACE of my appliances and furniture. :rolleyes:
There are a few things to take into consideration when a fish “eats metal.”
Fish don’t always bite things out of hunger.
A fish will very rarely bite a bar of metal just laying on the lake floor. One instance I can think of where this will happen is if the metal is laying in a Largemouth Bass’s bed. During spawning, these bass will make and maintain these beds. If a foreign object enters the bed, the bass will pick it up and moving out.
Fish have no hands. When they’re curious about something, they grab it with their mouths to have a better understanding of what it is. If the fisherman is aware of the fish doing this, he can “set the hook” and potentially catch the fish. However, there are many times when a fish will bite the lure, feel that it’s hard and cold and in no way fishy then let the lure go either before the fisherman has time to react or even without the fisherman knowing the bite occurred. Fishing scents are sold to apply to lures to give the fisherman a larger window of time before the fish releases the bait.
Some fish are also territorial and will bite a piece of metal they mistake as a fish for this reason alone.
Other times you can get a “reaction bite” by working something that vaguely resembles a fish fast enough for the bigger predator fish to bite the lure before it can properly identify.
And of course, you can just completely fool a fish into thinking it’s eating the real deal but plastic is much better than metal for this.
A friend of mine lived in Calcutta as a child. Once, when his parents had a fancy dinner party, his mother spotted a cockroach walking across the table and being a good hostess she pronged it with her fork and ate it before any of the guests had seen it.
I’d say the main reason we’re not a staple prey animal is that (until the fairly recent past) we’re so terribly rare. Not only were there literally orders of magnitude fewer humans a few tens of thousands of years ago, the few humans that did exist were widely scattered in small bands because of the large amount of territory required for hunter-gatherers to subsist. No big herds of us; no regular migration pattern to depend on. We were occasional snacks for opportunistic predators here and there, but we were too few and far between to raise a family of little predators on (and we were wily prey too, no doubt.)
Roaches eat gecko poop.
The CiiiiIIIiiiiircle…the ciiiiiircle of liiiiiiiiife!
Geckos will eat roaches, and I’ve heard and seen news reports where a heavily infested building or apartment had geckos released into them to control the roaches.
If you do release one in your apartment you’ll almost never see them, but you’ll hear them bark. You will also have Gecko mess to clean up.
Hedgehogs eat them too, but if you allowed them to roam free they would drop quills.
Seeing a roach is pretty bad. Stepping on a hedgehog quill hurts like a motherfucker though.
(I have one as a pet)
I live in Arizona. The American cockroach gets up to 2 inches long and flies. And believe you me, it can hit what it’s aiming at. They are nocturnal, which is good. I am too, which is bad. I seem to be the only one that knows they’re in the neighborhood. Of course I have to be extremely sewer roach phobic. Go figure. I just know, when I die, it will be from a roach induced heart attack! The other night I was going through my bathroom door. Saw movement and turned my head to see. Right there on the door jamb, not 2 inches in front of my face, was the biggest one I have ever seen. And yes, I climbed up on the vanity and screamed like a catholic school girl. But what I came here to find out is this. Last night (early this morning) there was a roach on my porch, on it’s back, just barely twitching. I know this means it is dying and beyond hope. 2 hours later when the sun came up it was gone. WTF??? I have no cats, no centipedes, no fish on my porch that I know of, and the geckos here are not much bigger than the bug. Any idea what could have eaten it or taken it away? Do I have a new bug to be afraid of?
You can expect that a certain (statistically probable) number of roaches will escape from the jar by quantum tunneling.
Are they similar to the alligators, in that they grow to be giant albino sewer roaches? 
Zombies will eat roaches left unattended on a porch. That said, I assume this is an enclosed porch, because otherwise anything could have come for a brief visit to claim the available morsel. Or you might be wrong in your belief that a roach on its back is always beyond hope. It could have been a Norwegian Blue. They prefer kipping on their backs.
Well, if it was actually dying… any carnivore would take it… there were surely insects not far away… ants, scorpions, spiders, beetles, wasps and other big insects, many birds are carnivores.
Of course, this one was only diagnosed by you briefly, maybe you just stunned it …
made it fall onto its back and it sits there in a daze… Maybe it had help to get back upright, eg a 2nd cockroach comes to investigate and MacGyver up a solution ?
Reality show contestants. But turns out they’re more annoying than the roaches.
Bugs don’t bother me, in general, but zombie roaches, that’s too much.