If the sight of a cockroach scuttling across your kitchen floor is enough to trigger paroxysms of disgust, then you'd be well advised to take a deep breath before browsing through "Cockroaches in the Home, Cockroaches Everywhere!!!" This exceptionally well-named publication was written by a team led by Sesai Mpuchane, associate professor of biological sciences at the University of Botswana, and it is meant to be scary. Its purpose is to raise awareness among householders, street vendors, and other groups of the biology of these reviled creatures, in the hope that they can be better controlled.
The booklet's 73 pages are crammed with illustrations showing some of the approximately 4,000 species of cockroaches that populate the planet, plus their feces, eggs, and nymphs. It also reports the findings of a study Mpuchane and her colleagues conducted a few years ago to survey the cockroach population of Gaborone, the capital of ...
