Flying Cockroaches Are Here Because It's Too Damn Hot
Summer: A time for ice cream, barbecues, and your worst nightmare to take flight.
It remains to be seen what forms all the harbingers of this election cycle apocalypse will take, but it seems that as Trump Tower is scaled and its eponymous owner casually suggests that his opponent should be assassinated, the first of such indicators has descended upon New York City.
Correction: ascended — flying cockroaches are (nearly) here, and they are the mascot this garbage year deserves.
To be fair, our favorite new dairy source has always come with wings, but they don’t generally use them. What’s changed is the sudden, extreme rise in heat: Like a dog that pants because it’s unable to sweat, cockroaches flutter their wings for absolutely no other purpose than to fan themselves to keep cool. (The proper verb, according to DNAinfo New York’s report on Friday, is “glide.”)
“In hot steam tunnels, something with the temperature and the humidity encourages them to fly,” Ken Schumann, an entomologist at Bell Environmental Services, told DNAinfo. “When it’s warm and steamy that seems to be what they like.”
And to make this situation just a tad more gross: New York has at least seven different types of cockroaches. In a summer of horrible heat, horrible movies, a horrible campaign season, and now a horrible flying insect situation, we really can’t get a break, can we?
