does anybody know why the only organism that can survive from a nuclear disaster is the cockroach?

Question

I 've heard this once and I was wondering if it's true, and if it is, why it is so.

Answer 1

Cockroaches and "The Bomb"
You've probably heard the story about cockroaches surviving a nuclear war: we die but they live! This is supposed to make you feel better when you have trouble getting rid of these critters.
So, the real truth: radiologists have found that humans can safely withstand a one-time exposure of 5 rems (A "rem" is the dosage of radiation that will cause a specific, measured amount of injury to human tissue). A lethal dose is 800 rems or more (people are exposed to about 16 rems during their lifetime).

Insect researchers have found that cockroaches can tolerate a much higher dose -- really higher! The lethal dose for the American cockroach is 67,500 rems and for the German cockroach it is between 90,000 and 105,000 rems (yikes!). In truth the amount of radiation that cockroaches can withstand is equivalent to that of a thermonuclear explosion. So, show a little respect the next time your chasing one through the kitchen with a spray can in your hand!

Reprinted from the Urban Pest Control Research Center Newsletter, April 8, 1996. By Bill Robinson, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Department of Entomology

http://www.ent.iastate.edu/ipm/hortnews/1996/12-13-1996/bomb.html

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Answer 2

Like most myths, that's based on a shred of fact, and is so appealing that it lives on, but it's fundamentally too vague to be useful. How big a 'disaster' are we talking about? How widespread? Personally, I'd figure that anything serious enough to eradicate bacterial organisms would be way more than a cockroach could stand, and then again there are lots of other small animals and plants that live in such protected conditions that they too might well survive anything short of a ground-zero blast.

Answer 3

A movie made in the '50s starring James Arness entitled "Them" proved that ants can not only survive but grow to tremendous size. And I forget the title but there was another one in which a military officer grew to hundreds of feet in height before they fired a giant hypodermic syringe at his butt with a bazooka to shrink him back down.

Besides, if cockroaches were the ONLY thing to survive they wouldn't last long after the last scraps of food in my kitchen was consumed.

Answer 4

It's karma.

All the bad people who create weapons and kill people come back as cockroaches. A sad reflection on the state of the hairless apes.

Answer 5

No, it is not true of the few nuclear disasters on record, many people and other animals survived.

Answer 6

I've heard its cockroaches and Keith Richards but neither is probably true.