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14 July 2021 Comparison of Diet Preferences of Laboratory-Reared and Apartment-Collected German Cockroaches
Samantha McPherson, Ayako Wada-Katsumata, Eduardo Hatano, Jules Silverman, Coby Schal
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Abstract

The German cockroach, Blattella germanica (L.) (Blattodea: Ectobiidae), is a common pest of human-built structures worldwide. German cockroaches are generalist omnivores able to survive on a wide variety of foods. A number of studies have concluded that laboratory-reared B. germanica self-select diets with an approximate 1P:3C (protein-to-carbohydrate) ratio. We predicted that field-collected insects would exhibit more variable dietary preferences, related to the wide-ranging quality, quantity, and patchiness of foods available to them. We compared diet self-selection of B. germanica within apartments and in the laboratory by offering them a choice of two complementary diets with 1P:1C and 1P:11C ratios. We observed high variation in the population-level self-selection of these diets among individual apartment sites as well as among various life stages tested in laboratory-based assays. Significant differences between populations in various apartments as well as between populations maintained in the laboratory suggested that factors beyond temporary food scarcity influence diet choice. Nevertheless, we found significant correlations between the amounts of diets ingested by cockroaches in apartments and cockroaches from the same populations assayed in the laboratory, as well as between males, females, and nymphs from these populations. These findings suggest that females, males, and nymphs within apartments adapt to the local conditions and convergently prefer similar amounts of food of similar dietary protein content.

© The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Entomological Society of America. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.
Samantha McPherson, Ayako Wada-Katsumata, Eduardo Hatano, Jules Silverman, and Coby Schal "Comparison of Diet Preferences of Laboratory-Reared and Apartment-Collected German Cockroaches," Journal of Economic Entomology 114(5), 2189-2197, (14 July 2021). https://doi.org/10.1093/jee/toab139
Received: 27 April 2021; Accepted: 14 June 2021; Published: 14 July 2021
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KEYWORDS
ecology
German cockroach
nutrition
urban
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