From Nature, 20 May 2024:
A ubiquitous household pest has unexpected origins. A cockroach that lives in human dwellings all over the world is known as the German cockroach — but it did not come from Germany originally. A study published today1 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that the creature originated in South Asia and spread globally because of its affinity for human habitats.
Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus was the first scientist to describe the cockroach — which he named Blattella germanica — in 1776 in Europe, hence the assumption about its German origins. “They did not originate from there, but they were domesticated there and then started to spread across the world,” says study co-author Qian Tang, an evolutionary biologist now at Harvard University in Boston, Massachusetts. Read more.
Bianca Nogrady 