In my case it was the piles of rabbit shit under the hutch that did it.
They like SHIT?! God, is there NOTHING they won’t eat? :eek:
My mother has lived in Florida the vast majority of her life, she is about 60. We bought a house to redo that had been vacant for several years. The usual broken windows, etc, it was an old wood frame house. She called 4 different companies to come out and do the “annual” pest control. She had my brother douse the house from top to bottom also.
The hair fell off the cat, but by god, we didn’t have bugs. Well, except for the occasional fly-by by a palmetto bug.
That woman will not tolerate bugs.
No experience with roaches, but my mom’s house in Seattle was once infested with ants. Not a few here and there on the kitchen counter, but a swarm several inches deep in the cubbies in her entertainment center. She had to toss her VCR. Actually, I think she tossed the whole entertainment center.
As far as I am aware, no, there is nothing they won’t eat. My sole experiences with roaches have been with the tropical ones on holiday (no big deal, part of the local colour) and with German Cockroaches (the little tiny fast ones) in my flat. After having no 1 run across my flat-panel monitor while I was playing Half-Life 2 in the dark[li], and number 2 leg it across the kitchen while we werehaving breakfast, we called the council pest people, who promptly saturated our flat in chemicals, and then invited themselves into the flats above, below and on either side for more hormone-bait-and-poison action. According to Sid the 'sterminator, the only way to deal with an infestation is to blitz the problem and all the surrounding area - so if your neighbours won’t cooperate, it’s time to move out.[/li]
Why yes, having a roach run across my field of vision 20cm in front of my nose at a tense moment did make me jump in the air and squeal like a little girl.
I advise all of you never to move to Africa. I try to keep my house clean, but as my walls are made of mud, there is only so much I can do. Roaches can and do rest in great numbers in any corner where there is stuff (a pile of clothes, some papers, anything…no closet or corner is safe.) They’ve been a little better since I got my cat, but I know they are there. But none of these stories sound at all horrifying to me. That’s my daily life.
One friend of mine killed 150 roaches in her house in one hour.
Another decided it’d be a good idea to spray incecticide down the pit latrine. ALL the roaches living in it evacuated, covering his entire yard with a lawn of roaches.
Yeah, it’s one of the reasons (one of the many reasons) I don’t want to live in India.
Any of us who played D&D are now thinking of the 7th level Priest Spell, “Creeping Doom,” if not the Old Testament plague on which it’s based. :eek:
The thing you learn in Florida is that the palmetto bugs, while huge and icky, are not an indication you are a bad housekeeper, it’s an indication you live in Florida. It’s the little ones you have to worry about.
When we went up to SC to clean out our rental property to prepare for sale, the place was crawling with roaches. I kept my purse in the fridge because there was no way I was leaving it on the counter. We bought those house bombs and bombed the house three different times, and still had to get the exterminator out. Twice.
Apparently, that’s true up here in Illinois, as well. When the weather gets cold, we occasionally get these huge ones in the house…they look like palmettos, but they don’t fly. We have opened up nearly every wall in the house doing renovations, and have never seen a roach of any kind, so we researched what these things were. Turns out, they are some outdoor roach which will come inside if it’s cold out. Oh my god do they freak me out. The first time I ever saw one, my husband was out of town. I doused the thing with bug spray, and it ran under a basket we have that holds firewood. I was too afraid to pick up the basket, so I left it there. When my husband came home, I made him deal with it, and when he saw the thing, he was amazed…except for that one giant roach that died in my apartment that I mentioned earlier, neither one of us had ever seen a roach that big. Gross.
OK, you win. That’s the grossest thing in this thread. So far.
Are you kidding? To a cockroach, heaven is a warm, moist sewer.
So is there some reason I should not let geckos roam free in my house?
Heh. I wish I coulda seen that! Kinda like the fan is pitching the bug and you’re batting with the spatula. 
Do they keep the roach population down? Do you have to feed them anything else to keep them around? How’s it working?
The best roach killer and protection I’ve found is Raid Max Roach and Ant Spray. This stuff really works and lasts a good while.
Again in Kaua’i, we had dinner on the patio of a local restaurant. This patio had plenty of nighttime lighting under the roof, which attracted plenty of bugs and geckos. We had the opportunity of observing the geckos’ hunting techniques.
On several occasions, a roaming German cockroach would walk right past the nose of a hunting gecko. We disturbed our dining neighbors by yelling “Grab that roach, stupid!”, but not once did a gecko react. Even the largest geckos seemed only interested in 'skeeter-sized insects, and they ignored larger bugs completely. They were fast as hell zipping forward and snapping up the 'skeeters, however. Cute.
We’ve only had a few in our apartment, which is great. However, just last night, I looked up from the computer and in the other room there was a 2" one walking on the wall. My wife was sitting next to me, and I didn’t want her to see it since she’ll scream, so I told her I was going to the bathroom, and I went and smacked it with a newspaper.
I was going to write a tread about roaches and came back to find that I had been beaten to it. :mad:
The largest one I ever saw was when I lived in the southern island of Kyushu when I was on my mission. There were some Japanese sister missionaries living in the same town not too far away and we got a hysterical call from them one day.
My companion picked up the phone and one was screaming “(something, someone) is in the living room, help!” Even I could hear her and her companion both screaming. It took a few minutes to find out that they were screaming about a roach and not an attacker. They claimed that the thing was 6" long.
OK, there’s no way it could be that big, but we went down to help them out. The girls had barricaded themselves into the bathroom which was off the kitchen, as well as closed to door to the living room, ensuring this giant roach couldn’t get at them.
We went into battle; and I’ll be damned if that thing weren’t 6” long. A good spray and we whacked it as well, after which we found out that (1) it was two 3” roaches in the middle of making lots more roaches and (2) they do so by locking their rear ends together, which doesn’t unhook quickly.
I was once in the middle of Times Square at about midnight (Brodway show and then a snack) and I saw the biggest roach I have ever seen in my life. It had to be at least 3 inches long. Just walking down Broadway like it was part of the crowd.
Darkness, bright lights, sleepy brain, huge roach. Surreal moment.
Possibly the geckos eat baby roaches? The baby roaches I’ve seen are only about the size of ladybugs.
They need good hiding spots to sleep during the day, and water to drink. I’m not a biologist but I suspect big eyes, soft skin, and sticky feet translate into a bigger than average water budget. That’s why when you find them indoors, they’re in the bathroom…they’re looking for water. That’s my theory anyway. My outside windows get condensation at night from my a/c, so I always have geckos living around the place.
Although I’ve never seen one make a roach kill, I’ve found several palmetto bugs on my balcony with the heads torn off and guts sucked out. I always assume it was a gecko that did it.
The geckos are naturally there just like roaches or spiders, I didn’t introduce them to our home. I guess they have adapted to living with humans. They eat the smaller roaches and mosquitoes. They seem to be doing a great job along with the boric acid. The only downside is that they like to hide in places where they are easily squashed without even knowing they are there, like door jambs and window sills.