Cockroaches are becoming even harder to kill than currently assumed.
These pest roaches arent just gross food-stealing nuisances, thoughthey can also cause asthma or spread disease.
But they are genuinely hardy survivors, and theyve only gotten better at evading our weapons.
A can of bug spray© Krit of Studio OMG via Getty
But theres been surprisingly little research directly looking at how these products fare against real-world roach populations.
The latter two conditions were intended to mimic the sort of residual exposure that sprays leave behind.
As expected, the frozen-in-time roaches easily succumbed to the spray products under almost every scenario.
But the real world roaches werent quite so easy to take down with only limited exposure.
The findings werepublishedWednesday in theJournal of Economic Entomology.
So the most common system of these products is also the one most likely to fail.
And these sprays arent risk-free either, since the chemicals inside them can potentially sicken people and pets.
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