Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, October 11, 1993 TAG: 9310110028
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: FRANCIS X. CLINES THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Medium
Amid the various life rhythms of the city, none is so impervious to probing and reform as the vast cockroach population cycle on which L. Randy Dupree is about to lecture once more for the new class of aspiring integrated pest managers at Bronx Community College.
"That's the term they use now instead of exterminators," says Dupree, the city's expert on the cockroach, who offers no demurral at the political fanciness of the title, for it acknowledges the city can, at best, only manage its roaches, never defeat them.
But in some ways the cockroach, with 350 million years' experience under its exoskeleton, is managing the city better:
"When clean-air laws ended garbage-burning in apartment houses, that's when the first complaints about roach infestation began coming in from Fifth Avenue, Central Park West and the other affluent, better-maintained neighborhoods because they had to begin compacting and holding garbage for pickup," Dupree, the city's assistant health commissioner for community services, said with a small smile. "The air got better for humans, but so did the food for roaches."
Dupree's lessons on the cockroach could fill entire newspaper sections, stinting only the relationships column, for the female roach needs but one act of sex to store enough male seed to reproduce monthly and account for 35,000 more roaches in less than two years. "Not much fun, but a lot of life," Dupree noted.
Cockroaches are not known to be disease carriers, they have no natural predators in the urban jungle, and they really can walk on water and even fly.
"Oh, sure, I've seen them fly when they're trapped or frightened," Dupree said, proud of a creature that evolutionists figure was probably the first flying animal.
Dupree is the city's proven master of fauna public relations. Twenty years ago, he coined the term super-rat to describe the gradual, inevitable resistance of rats to the latest poisons. "They were getting ready to cut my budget," he recalls of bureaucrats. "I said, `Oh, yeah? Have you heard about super-rat?' and they never cut that budget."
The thing he relishes about cockroaches is that no one is foolish enough even to consider declaring war on them. Merely cutting back epidemic situations is the most workable hope, Dupree teaches.
Mercifully, the budding integrated pest managers will be taught the bugs' one weakness.
"It's their own fastidiousness," Dupree said. "They clean themselves carefully." He does an imitation of leg- and mandible-licking as he explains why the remedy of a perimeter of boric acid powder works so well when the roaches scoot across the sticky granules.
by CNB