Cockroaches
Your home is the perfect environment for roaches to live and breed. Your home has numerous nesting sites and plenty of food and water needed for roaches to thrive. Roaches enter your home through small cracks and crevices, drain and sewer pipes, vents, and electrical ingress points to name a few.
Once inside, roaches can be a pervasive pest, multiplying quickly. They can remain active all year long. They feed on starchy foods, paper, fabric and decaying organic material. Roaches are nocturnal. Seeing a roach in your home during the day may be a sign of a serious infestation.
If you have children with asthma or allergies, it is important to get rid of the infestation as quickly as possible. Cast-off roach skins become airborne and act as an allergen that can cause an allergic reaction in sensitive individuals.
Common Types of Cockroaches in Southwest Florida
If you live in Florida, with all the heat and humidity, you’ve more than likely seen a cockroach. There are so many species of cockroaches, and some are worse to have in your home than others. Let’s take a look at 3 of the more common roaches that you may find in a South Florida home: the American Cockroach (also known as a Palmetto Bug) and the German Cockroach.
1. German Cockroach
Let’s start with the most severe roach to find in a home, the German Cockroach. They’re the most common nuisance cockroach that people find in their homes. They prefer houses and buildings to any other habitat, and reproduce faster than any other cockroach species. These roaches’ have wings, but don’t fly, instead they glide.
They’re dangerous in homes because they can spread disease by contaminating food and cooking surfaces. They shed periodically and leave behind egg casings that can cause asthma attacks and trigger allergies.
These roaches are 0.5 inches in length, so one of the smaller roaches you would come in contact with. An adult is light brown with two dark stripes running down its thorax. A nymph is smaller, darker and has a tan stripe running down its back.
In apartment buildings they can crawl through shared pipes and ducts to infest additional units and quickly become a wide spread problem. You’ll most likely find them in kitchens and bathrooms as they like to hide near food, water and sources of heat. If they become too large of a problem you can find them in other parts of your home like bedrooms and closets.
Every few weeks they can lay 30-40 eggs. Females carry the eggs until 1-2 days before hatching. A single one can be responsible for the births of more than 30,000 babies in one year, with nymphs maturing at 40-125 days. When it comes to German Roaches, proper roach control is extremely important to gain control of the problem.
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2. American Cockroach
Also known as a Palmetto Bug, these common household roaches prefer the outdoors, and is less likely to infest living spaces like a German Roach. These roaches can also spread disease and trigger symptoms of allergies and asthma.
They move rapidly, but doesn’t often use their wings to fly. They can get up to 3 inches in length, making them the largest of common roaches. They’re reddish-brown with a light-yellow band outlining their thorax. Adults are large with wings and nymphs are not.
These pests can get in homes through piping and small gaps in the foundation. They often live in trees, gardens and sewers, preferring areas with heat and humidity. In doors they’ll hide in bathrooms, kitchens, laundry rooms and boiler rooms. In a single year a female can be responsible for more than 800 babies, laying 12-16 eggs at a time, that might not hatch for 2 months or longer. Nymphs mature slowly taking between 65-400 days. The prefer a diet of fermenting foods but will scavenge for crumbs and scraps. Outside they prefer to feed on leaves, wood, fungi, algae and smaller insects.
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