Cockroaches Have Individual Personalities And Different Character Traits, Study Finds

Most people hate them, but they also know that cockroaches are crafty and clever little creatures. A new study confirms that and claims that roaches have their own personalities and even individual character traits.

The study, carried out by researchers from the Université Libre de Bruxelles, could go some way to explain why roaches are such amazing survivors and so highly adaptable.

The scientists focused on the behavior patterns of the Periplaneta americana, or American cockroach (pictured above), when exposed to light.

The head researcher from the team, Issac Planas, said that cockroaches make perfect test subjects,

“Cockroaches are a simple animal, but they can reach a complex decision. So with little information, with little interactions, only knowing if I have a partner here or not, only with this information, they can make complex decisions.”

Planas went on to explain that the main purpose of the experiment was to study differences in the behavior of the creatures when it came to decision making.

The cockroaches’ own personalities would determine whether or not they settled under the light in the place they were kept, this would highlight the fact that, even though they all look the same, cockroaches are different from each other.

Planas said that cockroaches differ from other insects, which only work according to a social hierarchy; cockroaches are each responsible for their own decisions.

He added that this was vital research, which could be applied to other animals,

“We have a group of equal individuals that reach a choice, can have consensus decision making as we can see in sheep, bats, some monkey species, fish, birds, for example, or also humans in this case.”

That said, the most remarkable finding from the study for Planas was that, despite the fact it took some time, ultimately all the cockroaches ended up underneath the shelters provided and out of the light.

“The fact, and we didn’t expect it, is that they always reach this consensus. So we expected that some groups have more trouble than others to resist consensus or to choose a shelter, but at the end, no, they always finished aggregated. So it is something really inside the individuals or in the cockroaches. So that was really, that was amazing.”

For the future, Planas told reporters, he intends to carry out further studies on cockroaches which will focus on analyzing individual cockroach behavior and how learning affects the group mentality.