Dung beetles are insects.

Is it safe to eat cockroaches?

And cockroaches, as anyone who's tried to get rid of them knows, have become really immune to the poisons that we're using.

This poison is very effective in getting rid of roaches.

This lovely creature is an Asian cockroach.

When you touched the cockroach leg, what did it feel like?

I have no idea of what comes next, so I just used robotic and natural cockroaches as the future, as a little warning.

And if folding a single praying mantis from a single uncut square wasn't interesting enough, then you could do two praying mantises from a single uncut square.

And this is a spearing mantis shrimp, or stomatopod.

And mantis shrimp are called mantis shrimp after the praying mantises, which also have a fast feeding appendage. And I started to think, well, maybe it will be interesting, while listening to their sounds, to figure out how these animals generate very fast feeding strikes.

When you touched the cockroach leg can you get the microphone for him?

You get a folded shape in this case, a cockroach.

I'm passing some cockroaches around. Take a look at their feet.

No problem for the cockroach they can grow them back, if you care.

This was how mantis shrimps make these very fast strikes.

I bet my friend 100 that he wouldn't eat a live cockroach. I lost!

So you're looking at roughly one percent of the brain of a cockroach.

Where everything was displayed in poorly labeled roach proof bins.

This is a death's head cockroach. This is an American cockroach you think you don't have in your kitchen.

It's what made you smack your baby brother, stamp on a cockroach, scratch your mother.

Maybe we could give it to our curator and see if he'd be brave enough to touch the cockroach.

This is a recording I made of a mantis shrimp that's found off the coast of California.

They were often kept three to a cell, sleeping on the floor, struggling with cockroaches and suffering poor hygienic conditions owing to lack of water.

You can do another experiment where you can take a cockroach with a foot, and you can remove its foot.

So, actually, I started working on what's called the mantis shrimp a few years ago because they make sound.

Or is it the amplified sound of a synapse firing in the brain of a cockroach?

So, mantis shrimp come in two varieties there are spearers and smashers.

People tap in and they have thieves who are called grillos or crickets, and they steal the electrical power and wire the neighborhood.

And what you're seeing here is a bait box with a bunch of like the cockroaches of the ocean there are isopods all over it.

So this is a mantis shrimp. There are the eyes up here, and there's that raptorial appendage, and there's the heel.

And what he showed in mantis shrimp is that they use what's called a catch mechanism, or click mechanism.

Now, this is pattern thinking. That praying mantis is made from a single sheet of paper no scotch tape, no cuts.

And then we did a series of calculations, and what we were able to show is that these mantis shrimp have to have a spring.

Now, the other type of mantis shrimp is the smasher stomatopod, and these guys open up snails for a living.

And mantis shrimp are officially the fastest measured feeding strike of any animal system. So our first surprise.

And so I just put robotic and natural cockroaches out there, but you can fill in whatever you want. This is not a forecast.

And two weeks after this drawing was done, we actually had our first project contract, at AeroVironment, on robotic cockroaches, which was very frightening to me.

So the next and final question was, well, how much force does a mantis shrimp produce if they're able to break open snails?

If you think you're successful or cockroaches are successful, it turns out that there's ten trillion trillion Pleurococcus sitting out there.

And I'm talking specifically about synanthropic species, which are species that have adapted specifically for human ecologies, species like rats and cockroaches and crows.

So this is a potent force in fluid systems, and just to sort of take it one step further, I'm going to show you the mantis shrimp approaching the snail.

(1) The environment inside and outside any food production or marketing establishment shall be kept clean and tidy measures shall be taken to eliminate flies, rodents, cockroaches and other harmful insects and to remove conditions for their propagation and a prescribed distance shall be kept from any toxic or harmful site

What we discovered is whether you look at the leg of a human like Richard, or a cockroach, or a crab, or a kangaroo, the relative leg stiffness of that spring is the same for everything we've seen so far.

So, a quick strike like that. And if we slow it down a bit, this is the mantis shrimp the same species recorded at 1,000 frames a second, played back at 15 frames per second.

Biologist Sheila Patek talks about her work measuring the feeding strike of the mantis shrimp, one of the fastest movements in the animal world, using video cameras recording at 20,000 frames per second.