131–140 of 154 posts
Why should humanity 'stop' everything as it sees fit with imperfect knowledge and burgeoning ego? Cockroaches have a valuable role to play in degrading the vast quantities of biological waste we put out. We don't need to stop them.
Mix baking soda and sugar together and put them in a bowl. Will kill them dead without toxicity to humans. Boric acid has no resistance. Bay leaves repel about every insect known to man. Roaches hate bay leaves and will not be in the same area with them. Editing to say that bay leaves can be crushed in a coffee grinder, put in a plastic ketchup/mustard bottle as a powder, and the resulting powder "puffed" into areas…
No, but you encourage the selection of the organisms who have a resistance to citric acid, or whatever substance you are using. I think it's very presumptuous to say that by killing everything with a substance you aren't selecting for that resistance.
Mix baking soda and sugar together and put them in a bowl. Will kill them dead without toxicity to humans. Boric acid has no resistance. Bay leaves repel about every insect known to man. Roaches hate bay leaves and will not be in the same area with them. Editing to say that bay leaves can be crushed in a coffee grinder, put in a plastic ketchup/mustard bottle as a powder, and the resulting powder "puffed" into areas…
Does the sugar not attract ants?
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We could use Tokkay Gekkos to get them. Then the cockroach problem becomes a gekko problem. Then we use a cat and the gekko problem becomes a cat problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokay_gecko
Is having too many cats a problem though? Looks more like a bonus to me
Too many cat's is a huge problem. They carry unique diseases, most notably those transmissible to your pet cats. Also, toxoplasmosis gandhi which will kill large mammals in an area, including whales. It also infects humans through under-cooked meat. Cat scratch fever. Cats can also transmit whatever local diseases and parasites other mammals carry, but effectively as they tend to live in large colonies close to humans.
Cats murder your local bird populations, which in my area, includes a number of endangered species. I'm sure in other areas, there might be other endangered creatures cats remove.
And finally, there's the typical nuisances of getting into food stores and trash, dying on motorways, feces accumulation (even before considering diseases), and noise complaints.
Further a large feral cat population creates rabid, cat-hating humans which IMHO is also an issue.
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How can they develop a resistance to something that physically destroys their exoskeleton? It acts as an abrasive. >Boric acid also has the reputation as "the gift that keeps on killing" in that cockroaches that cross over lightly dusted areas do not die immediately, but that the effect is like shards of glass cutting them apart. This often allows a roach to go back to the nest where it soon dies. edit: found the art…
I get the sense that someone has confused boric acid with diatomaceous earth, and spread their confusion to Wikipedia. For an insect with a waxy cuticle over their exoskeleton, walking over diatomaceous earth is basically like John McClane in Die Hard, running in bare feet over broken glass. Except instead of bleeding to death from the lacerations, the water in their hemolymph diffuses out at a faster rate through th…
Here's one of many. This one is from the National Pesticide Information Center which operates out of Oregon State University in partnership with the EPA (OSU has a large focus on agricultural research.)
> It can also scratch and damage the exterior of insects.
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I get the sense that someone has confused boric acid with diatomaceous earth, and spread their confusion to Wikipedia. For an insect with a waxy cuticle over their exoskeleton, walking over diatomaceous earth is basically like John McClane in Die Hard, running in bare feet over broken glass. Except instead of bleeding to death from the lacerations, the water in their hemolymph diffuses out at a faster rate through th…
I think you're mistaken. There are many other independent sources that talk about its action as an abrasive. You may be the one spreading confusion. Here's one of many. This one is from the National Pesticide Information Center which operates out of Oregon State University in partnership with the EPA (OSU has a large focus on agricultural research.) > It can also scratch and damage the exterior of insects. http://npi…
The falsifiable hypothesis is that crystalline boric acid can kill an insect without being ingested, by a purely mechanical action.
Sassolite (boric acid) has a Mohs hardness of ONE. Please understand why I might be skeptical of its supposed reputation for killing things by scratching them. Minerals with low Mohs hardness, like graphite, talc, and yes, also boric acid, are used as lubricants.[0]
I also question whether those multiple sources in support are truly independent, as I have seen several search results that quote the Wikipedia article verbatim.
Perhaps their extinction could be engineered genetically, like mosquitoes. Or we could introduce innocuous species that eat them. Cold also kills cockroaches. All of these have blowback, however.
It's cheap. It wipes out mold spores too.
A downside is that stuff like cloth can get bleached. Metals may get discolored.
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1. Spiders are not insects. In fact, from my experience, a lot of proper insecticides don't do squat to spiders. The toxicity pathways are simply different between insects and spiders, I guess. 2. I actually like ants, unless you're talking about the really nasty ones like army ants or red fire ants. I don't mind them in my house, stealing my food; I just don't want to accidentally kill them. Some people raise them i…
Spiders don't stand a chance against orange oil concentrate. It handily kills them right along with every other crawly thing. I won't spray the ones that stay up high, but if you've ever seen a Wolf spider in your house, you'd spray them, too. They can get rather large. If only I could convince my wife to move someplace civil like Vermont or just slightly east of Seattle, like Issaquah or Snohomish. Texas has too man…
In my opinion, if you have any kind of spider infestation on your property, then you have something else to worry about. Spiders need food to thrive, which usually means insects or other arthropods, which in turn means you have an infestation of other arthropods.
So why are you having a bug infestation in the first place? Are you leaving food crumbs all over the place? Do you have damp places where fungi and moss will grow? Insects and all kinds of critters really like those conditions. If you fix those, your insect and (consequently) spider infestation will most likely be gone.
In the case of mosquitoes, we are the food, so you can’t fix that, but you can clear out bodies of still water, which will decimate the number of mosquito larvae.
Killing them (with insecticides) only fixes the symptoms, not the root of the problem.
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I'm sure it's possible, but it's like a human being developing a resistance to a hammer to the skull. It would take much more than few generations of selective pressure to do that.
Your skull IS such an adaptation. Not hammer, but it does protect your CNS from many physical harms, and was evolutionarily gifted to you back in the days of early vertebrates
Read my comment again.
Thank you.