COBY SCHAL
Blanton J. Whitmire Distinguished Professor
of Structural Pest Management
North Carolina State University© MARC HALL, NORTH CAROLINA STATE UNIVERSITYCoby Schal’s first attempt at fieldwork was short-lived. In 1978, as a graduate student at the University of Kansas, he arrived in Costa Rica to observe cockroach aggression in the wild. Unfortunately, the first place he looked for his subjects was at the bottom of hollow trees packed with bats, which required picking through piles of moist guano where cockroaches feed.
“I got really sick,” says Schal. “I got a massive fungus infection in my lungs.” He spent the rest of his first 2 weeks in Costa Rica in the hospital, then was transferred to New York University Langone Medical Center, where he spent months recovering, including nightly treatments with an experimental antifungal drug. “It was just awful,” says Schal. “And that was my initial experience with biology.”
But the illness wasn’t enough to scare him away. “I went right back, and subsequently spent 3∏ years in Costa Rica,” says Schal, now an entomologist at North Carolina State University (NC State). “But I was not going back into those trees.” Instead, Schal watched cockroaches out in the fresh air, perched in the forest foliage during the ...
