Wednesday, February 17, 1999 Published at 18:58 GMT
Cockroaches: World champion side-steppers
Cockroaches can dodge more rapidly than anything else on Earth
In the natural world, dodging disaster is vital if you are not going to be pounced on by predators. Now, the world champion dodger has been crowned - the cockroach.
"We saw that the cockroach can do something no other animal can, so we wanted to look at that," Professor Jeff Camhi, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, told BBC News Online.
What has baffled his team is how the cockroach can change direction to avoid obstacles so rapidly and so often. To change direction, an electrical impulse has to travel from the tip of its long antennae into the brain and then onto the legs. The nerve cells in the antennae are very narrow and therefore should transmit the information slowly.
The roaches were filmed by a high-speed video camera (recording 250 frames per second) as they ran along a tin wall. With a straight wall, they kept a constant distance away, apparently using their long antennae as a guide.
The bugs managed to repeat the feat when a zigzag wall was used. To make sure they were not using their eyes to spot the turns, the researchers blindfolded the cockroaches with drops of darkened wax. They still twisted and turned expertly.
The Periplaneta americana cockroach is three to four centimetres long but has five centimetre long antennae. They can run at up to 1 metre per second, which is the scaled equivalent of a human running at about 150 km/h (90 mph).
The research is reported in New Scientist magazine. Roy Ritzmann studies cockroach behaviour at Case Western Reserve University, Ohio and told the magazine: "The most talented roboticist in the world is not going to come close to what a cockroach can do - I'm amazed by them."
Photographs courtesy of Professor Joe Kunkel, University of Massachusetts at Amherst.