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Get to Know the Turkistan Cockroach
1 Jul, 2008 By: Hanif Gulmahamad Pest Management ProfessionalThis nocturnal import is increasing its presence in North America.
The Turkestan cockroach, Blatta lateralis (Walker), is rapidly expanding its range in the United States — and is also increasingly becoming a serious structural pest. While a good integrated pest management (IPM) program can help, it's especially critical to use nocturnal inspections to determine the extent of a Turkestan cockroach infestation.
Over the years, I've contributed information to help characterize the life history and ecology of B. lateralis in North America north of Mexico, and to develop tools that will help monitoring and detection, population management and our ability to mitigate the impact of this cockroach in urban and structural environments.
 Food and water left out for ferel cats in the area were providing the Turkestan cockroach population with two of their most significant requirements. |
CASE IN POINT
At one school in the San Fernando Valley experiencing an infestation of Turkestan cockroaches, we were able to manage the cockroach population and maintain it at tolerable levels through exclusion techniques. This included:
- Door sweeps
- Good exterior and interior trash-handling procedures
- Proper sanitation protocols, both indoors and out
- Extensive indoor monitoring and trapping
- Limited use of reduced-risk granular baits outdoors
- Indoor spot treatments with gel and dry flowable baits, when monitors indicated a localized treatment may be necessary.
While the roaches are primarily active at night, that's small comfort to the night custodians or other people who were at the school after dark, especially outside on its grounds. For this reason, outdoor control of peridomestic cockroaches is often necessary — and is frequently demanded by clients. Suppressing outdoor peridomestic cockroach populations reduces the structural invasion potential of these large, repugnant roaches.
Despite our best efforts at one infested location, however, we were still experiencing cockroach problems at the southwest corner of the property, where roaches were invading a bungalow.
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We carefully analyzed our control efforts in this area to determine what we might be overlooking. The same strategies and efforts were being carried out at other infested areas of the campus successfully. Speculation ran wild as to what the solution could be.
NIGHT MAKES RIGHT
In its native range, the Turkestan cockroach is known to infest sewers. With that in mind, we theorized that reinfestation was taking place from a manhole sewer access located in the middle of street intersections at the southwest corner of the property.
Recalling earlier work that was done on the Turkestan cockroach, we concluded that the best way to test our theory was to do a nighttime inspection.
For the Turkestan cockroach, nocturnal inspections should begin at sunset, following a warm day, and continue into the night until adequate data is obtained. We did as such, and in return found several enlightening facts to help us solve the case:
- Cockroaches were not invading the campus from four manhole accesses located in street intersections at the four corners of the property
- Cockroaches were not reinvading the campus from surrounding areas
- Cockroaches were, however, harboring in small nooks, crannies, cracks and holes in surface tree roots and the root flare of a declining mulberry tree near the infested bungalow
- Cockroaches were also living in cracks and joints in hardscapes located hundreds of feet away from the affected bungalow. Because of their distance, these harborages were not suspected before, and thus never baited. The cockroaches from these untreated areas were reinvading the nearby building.
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