Wanted, alive: 1,000 cockroaches

HOUSTON — Anyone who lives here has had to deal with them: two-inch-long Texas-size cockroaches, equal-opportunity home invaders that know no demographic or income boundaries.

Now the Houston Museum of Natural Science has issued a casting call for the ever-present pests. As it stocks a new insect exhibit, the museum has offered to buy up to 1,000 American cockroaches for a quarter apiece from people who bring them in.

"We needed a lot of roaches and didn't have time to collect them all ourselves," said Nancy Greig, the museum's curator of entomology.

Twice each week before the exhibit opens May 25, people can turn their roaches into cash at the museum. The catch is that the insects have to be alive and healthy.

On Saturday, the first day of the roach roundup, entomologist Laurie Pierrel set up a table in the museum lobby. Her first customer strolled in about an hour later with 39 cockroaches in a plastic box — the bounty from three days of roach wrangling in Megan Freemantle's central Houston bungalow.

Catching live roaches was easy, Freemantle said. She sprinkled dog kibble in the bottom of 5-gallon plastic buckets, pushed them against the wall, and let nature take its course. "They crawled down the wall and fell into the buckets," she said

For her trouble, Freemantle got an eye-roll from her 17-year-old daughter, and $9.75 from the museum.

Terry Vlasch, a third-grade teacher, brought a Ziploc bag holding one giant roach found crawling in his kitchen sink. He said he missed out on a bigger haul by killing about 100 roaches that were hiding under some backyard cinderblocks before the museum's offer was announced.

"I smashed them," he said, mourning the lost profit.

The newly purchased roaches were dumped into a plastic box, joining about 40 roaches previously caught by museum employees.

For hours, the homely box of bugs attracted children and repulsed parents, who peered inside and looked for roaches among the orange slices, dog food and rotting wood.

The roaches are nasty, said Serena Schwartz, 3. They're stinky and gross, said Heather Aumiller, 9. "I have cockroaches in my house," announced Lola Dinh, 5. Her mother, Tracy, blanched.

The museum's roach exhibit will feature a large Plexiglas box topped with a dome. The interior will be set up like a kitchen, Greig said. The box will be dark until a person's head hovers over the dome. This will activate a light in time to see a thousand roaches scurrying for cover.

After the museum buys 1,000 roaches, people who bring in their roaches will get a free pass to the museum instead of quarters. Extra insects may be sent to the big roach hotel in the sky, Greig said, but she doubts any will have to check in.

"We probably won't get 1,000," she said. "They're harder to catch than you think."

Pierrel suggests putting beer-soaked bread in the bottom of a jar, then wrapping the exterior with pantyhose to provide traction for the roaches. After the bug falls in, it can't crawl out of the smooth glass interior.

Greig said she prefers grabbing a roach with her hand. "It's much more efficient that way. You can always wash your hands afterward," she said.

Anyone skittish about catching live roaches should know that "roaches are sanitary," Greig said. "They constantly clean themselves and don't feed on filth. They're as clean as your house."