Florida Woods Cockroach

Appearance

The Florida wood cockroach is a dark to blackish brown, or a reddish brown after recent molting. Tegmina are very short, extending just past the mesonotum, and hind wings are absent.

Adults typically range from 30–40 mm. The winning specimen in a Florida cockroach size contest was a Florida wood cockroach which measured 62 mm. The species' dark brown ootheca is 14–16 mm long, contains 21-23 eggs, and has indentations that show where the eggs are located.

The Florida woods cockroach looks remarkably similar to the female oriental cockroach, and the two could be mistaken for each other by the casual observer.

Distribution

The species is reported in the West Indies and in a limited southeastern region of United States, consisting of the state of Florida, and coastal regions of Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Mississippi, Louisiana, south and southeast Texas, and southeast North Carolina. It is considered adventive, but not established, in the Canadian provinces of Newfoundland and Labrador and Nova Scotia.

Habitat

Natural habitats of the species include holes in dead trees, stumps, and woodpiles, cavities beneath bark, and sometimes leaf litter. It occasionally enters buildings.

It typically only becomes established in non habitable areas of buildings. Not uncommonly, palmetto bugs become established inside attics, where they commonly leave behind their distinctively large droppings along with occasional body parts from dead specimens.

Reproduction

Males can mate about 18 days after maturation, and females produce oothecae about every 8 days, beginning about 55 days after maturation. The oothecae are buried in soil or decaying logs, and hatch in 50 days at 30–36 °C. Parthenogenesis can occur, but the nymphal clones do not develop to adulthood.

Defense

When alarmed, adults can emit an extremely foul-smelling glandular secretion through a sternal membrane, ejected up to 1 m. Nymphs do not have this ability, and the secretion is built up over roughly 60 days from its final molt into adulthood. Males that were artificially drained required 30 days to replenish the stored amount. The secretion is composed primarily of -2-hexenal, -2-hexenol, and -2-hexenoic acid.

The secretion is used both to deter antagonizers and as an alarm pheromone to elicit escape responses in others of its species. It can irritate the eyes of humans, and can be toxic to the cockroach in a small container. In tests with two species of mice abundant in central Florida, the chemical defense was found effective at deterring predation by ''Peromyscus polionotus'', but at least some ''Peromyscus gossypinus'' mice were able to avoid chemical exposure by pushing the cockroach's abdomen downward and feeding from its head end.