In China, the cockroach is often called “xiao qiang,” meaning “little mighty.” These cockroaches are a way of life in Hawaii (not to eat but as pests).
However, I know some people that could cook these up real nice!
The American cockroach is the largest common house cockroach, about the length of a AA battery…it can live for a week without its head. It eats just about anything, including feces, the glue on book bindings, and other cockroaches, dead or alive. It can fly short distances and run as fast as the human equivalent of 210 miles per hour, relative to its size. All these feats and more are encoded in the American cockroach’s genome, its complete set of genetic instructions, which was sequenced by Chinese scientists and published on Tuesday in Nature Communications.
For now, Dr. Li is following up on the American cockroach’s extraordinary healing capabilities: cut a leg off, and the insect will quickly regenerate it. His team is identifying the proteins and pathways involved in this process, with the hope that they can be harnessed for medical treatments. Cockroach extract has long been used in traditional Chinese medicine to speed healing on cuts and burns. “We’ve uncovered the secret of why people call it ‘xiao qiang,’” he said. “Now we want to know the secrets of Chinese medicine.”
