Bringing Home His Work

Roth remembers another incident regarding his controversial paper on cockroach reproductive behavior. A friend saw that the paper was published with the authors' addresses, not the lab's. "He wrote back: 'Dear Lou, What in hell is going on in your basement." Roth laughs and adds that he has attempted to bring his work home, with diastrous results.

Trying to determine the efficacy of a wasp that parasitizes roach eggs, Roth brought home 100 cockroach egg cases and hid them in his basement. He then released 450 wasps in the basement, allowing them to parasitize the eggs. When it came time to collect the egg cases, Roth made two unpromising discoveries: First, that the wasps parasitized less than a third of the egg cases, and second, that he could not find about 20 of the egg cases.

"I didn't say anything to my wife, and a couple of weeks later, I heard a scream from my wife. She was down in the basement pointing to some newborn little cockroaches." Roth shakes his head. "That was the last experiment I did at home."

Now that Roth works primarily with pinned specimens, he does not have to worry about the insects escaping. While he concedes that he does miss the behavioral studies, he adds that the studying cockroach taxonomy is very important, particularly because so few people are doing it. However, funding for taxonomic research is scarce, and the entire field stands in danger of becoming a science of the past, he says.

"Today [taxonomy] is given lip service really," Roth says. "It's not glamorous." Ironically, Roth adds, "People keep plugging biological diversity, but it's still difficult to get support."

In fact, Roth says one known species on the Steppes of Russia have gone extinct during his lifetime, and he suspects that other unknown cockroach species are now gone as well. "At the rate the tropical rain forest is being destroyed, many of my friends are probably becoming extinct. I think that is one of the reasons we should be describing these things, so we have a record of them."