Are cockroaches resistant to radiation?
I have been told that cockroaches are more resistant to radiation and in a world nuclear war, only the cockroaches would survive. But I have not seen any publication that discusses it with any credibility. I can give only an opinion of my own. I have irradiated cockroaches and constructed killing curves for them using gamma irradiation. I have not compared their resistance to radiation with any other organism using the same equipment and thus can not comment on any relative resistance based on hard data. My opinion is that insects in general would be relatively resistant to radiation compared to non-insects, or non-arthropods more strictly. The lives of insects and other arthropods revolve around their molting cycles. During a molting cycle the cells of the insect divide usually only once. This is encoded in Dyar’s Rule, i.e. insects double their weight at each molt and thus their cells need divide only once per molting cycle. Now it just so happens that cells are most sensitive to rad
