Your Worst Nightmare Is Here: Cockroaches Are Becoming Immune To Pesticide And Won't Die Easily

Humanity is staring down a crossroads, where the options of paths to take are heat death from global warming, global flooding, or nuclear war.

Or of course, we could end up somewhere else completely, with giant swarms of mutated cockroaches taking over.

You might think you're the real apex predator, what with your ability to out-think a roach, or squish it with your chappal. You would be wrong of course. After all, what chance do you really have when the creepy crawlies are capable of both outlasting and out-breeding you?

And according to a new study from the Purdue University in Germany, cockroaches are even better survivors than we thought, and we believed they were pretty damn good at it to begin with.

The researchers were studying how German cockroach populations react to exposure to insecticides over time. If you know anything about how hardy these relentless pests are, you're probably guessing they eventually developed a resistance to the insecticide being used. That's absolutely right. But they also developed a resistance to other types of insecticides along the way as well.

And it's not the same way you might develop a tolerance to, for instance, spicy food. When roaches develop a resistance to something, they pass it on to their offspring.

So it's only a matter of time before we're living in a world with cockroaches immune to insecticide.

"This is a previously unrealized challenge in cockroaches," says Michael Scharf of Purdue University, the study leader. "Cockroaches developing resistance to multiple classes of insecticides at once will make controlling these pests almost impossible with chemicals alone."

The research was published in the journal Scientific Reports. You should probably go find a copy or something now, because this is clearly a tome that will be read to future generations, to help them understand why we live in subterranean tunnels to stay safe from the six-legged surface rulers.

Whatever you think, it's way worse

You see, exterminators usually use a combination of insecticides to be most effective. This is usually concocted from a mixture of chemicals of different types, so that an insect with resistance to one type still suffers the effects of another in the mix.

But that won't work anymore if cockroaches just develop multiple immunities at the same time. Eventually, we'll probably run out of chemical varieties to douse them with before they become immune to everything we have. Add to that the fact that a single female cockroach produces between 200 to 300 little ones in her average one year of life, and things begin to look really grim.

And if the swarms of gross crawlers do infest the surface, we can't even nuke them. Because those roaches can survive higher levels of radiation than we can, meaning they're going to start repopulating the surface long before we do, and we're back to square one.

The only way we stay ahead of this, Scharf says, is by relying less on chemical pest control. Better would be to improve sanitation to deny roaches the living conditions they crave. And when tackling them head on, we need to use physical disposal methods like specialized traps and vacuum cleaners.

If not, we might be slaves to the roach overlords in a few hundred years.