Wildlife of Yucatan: American cockroach

Hi there my Steemit friends and followers!

When writing this post, I remembered how my Slovakian buddy Hive account@matkodurko once accused me of showing only "disgusting creatures" in my Wildlife of Yucatan series and it made me laugh because the animal that I am going to feature here today is widely considered the most disgusting insect in the world :D Yes, we are taking about the cockroach aka cucaracha as they call it in Spanish.

So why did I even decide to include this dreaded creature in my series? Well, because it is very common here in Yucatan and it would be unfair to leave these guys out.

As you can see, both of these shots are very detailed and you might wonder if it really was me who took them. Yes, I took these close-ups but since I am not a big fan of this animal either and I used a dead cockroach that was lying on the ground in front of our house for the "photo shooting".

There are many cockroach species (about 4,600 according to Wikipedia) so I had to do a little research to identify this one and it seems to be the American cockroach (Periplaneta Americana). One of the largest cockroach species, the American cockroach was originally (despite its name) native only to Africa and Middle East but because of human commercial and traveling activities, it gradually became common in tropical climates all over the world.

The American cockroach is usually about 4 cm (1.6 in) long and it has one of the longest life cycles among all cockroaches (up to 700 days).

Thank you for visiting my blog. If you like posts about #nature, #animals, #traveling and discovering secrets and beauties of the #world, feel free to follow me as these are the topics I mostly write about. Have a wonderful day and keep on Steeming!