Health Issue: Cockroaches prefer dining as a group it seems...

Cockroaches prefer 

to dine together

          Cockroaches prefer dining as a group it seems. New research shows pesky critters cluster and remain feeding on one lump of good even if another morsel exists nearby.

          The result demonstrates that cockroaches possess a collective decision-making process previously thought to exist only in highly social species, such as ants and bees, according to the study scientists.

          But while other animals direct one another to food through complex mechanisms like pheromone trails (ants), communicative dances (bees), or vocal calls (vervet monkeys) all of which operate over a distance cockroaches seem to simply continue munching when already at the food source.

         "There is certainly no signal intentionally emitted. Instead the cockroaches seem to glean information inadvertently provied by the others," researcher Mathieu Lihoreau at Queen Mary, University of London, told live Science.

          "We should definitively pay more attention to cockroaches and other simple 'societies' as they provide researchers with good models for co-opertion and emergent properties of social life, that we could extrapolate to more sophisticated societies, like ours," Lihoreau said.