Cockroaches are too efficient to PP

(This one's going out to my brother Rick, who turns 56 today. He loves this kind of useless information even more than I do. Happy birthday, Rick!)

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I can't stand them, especially when they take over my kitchen and require more than one bullet to kill them. But I still have to marvel at the cockroach.

They can live anywhere, on nothing. I used to argue that they would be the one species that would survive a nuclear holocaust, an environmental disaster, fire, flood, famine, or asteroid strike. Even high-grade poison might kill off the first generation, but the second generation would tap dance in it.

I'm not a cat owner, but that animal amazes me because of its incredible quickness and balance (the tail acts as a counterweight). Mice, I understand, cannot burp or pass gas. Ants can carry many times their own weight and never break a sweat. But let's give the lowly cucaracha its due. If you want a survival machine, that's it.

What is it about the common cockroach? Its metabolism is so efficient it doesn't even urinate. This is according to Wired (and watch out for the popup ad that races across the screen like a ... well ...):

... researchers who sequenced the Blattabacterium genome have found that it converts waste into molecules necessary for a roach to survive. Every cockroach is a testimony to the power of recycling — thanks to their microbes, they don’t even need to pee ... “Blattabacterium can produce all of the essential amino acids, various vitamins, and other required compounds from a limited palette of metabolic substrates,” write entomologists in a study published Monday in the researchers have known that cockroaches need the microbes to survive: Kill Blattabacterium with antibiotics, and the insects die. They also knew that roaches store excess nitrogen — one of life’s essential elements, needed to make proteins, amino acids and DNA — inside their bodies, in tiny deposits of uric acid. But researchers didn’t know exactly what became of the uric acid after it was stored, or precisely what Blattabacterium did ...

Wow ... they can live in spilled coffee or even in puddles of beer, and never even need to run to the bathroom ...

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