How best to learn to identify roaches

S

saturdayroaches

Ootheca
Ive looked everywhere for some kind of guide, but the only thing ive found is for florida species (ive improved the formatiing and included it attatched). I want to get better at identifying roaches in the wild and in captivity, butscouring research papers is hard. What do yall recommend as the best way to learn to identify roaches? How do you use your resources?

key to florida species.pdf

 

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Well, if you have a facebook, post pictures in ROACHPARADISE and 9/10 times they are right on with identification.

 
When I first started keeping roaches, a lot of them, especially ones within the same genus, looked the same to me. Adults of some genera commonly available in the roach hobby such as Periplaneta, Pycnoscelus, Gyna, and Eublaberus are now easy for me to correctly ID to a species level most of the time. By looking at them over and over again, I quickly learned which characteristics belonged to which species. It's pretty easy once you know what to look for (coloration, pronotum pattern, size, habits, etc.). However, I still can't differentiate Blattella spp. (among many others) from one another <_<

 
Think about a cockroach genus. each roach in the genus are the same for the most part, but each species of that genus all hold a unique personality or unique physicality, that differentiates them from each other. Memorize those differences and you can tell a species apart from others :)

 
If you want to learn how to ID native roaches, bugguide is a fairly helpful website (thanks to one of the editors on there who's constantly trying to ID the roaches as best as he can :P ).

 
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