Australian wood cockroach

The Australian wood cockroach is a big, shiny black cockroach that lives in the forests of Australia. It is not a kitchen pest. It lives with its family inside old rotting logs.

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Fun facts
It lives in family groups, with grown-ups and babies sharing the same log.
The walls of its tunnels are made from its own droppings.
Its babies, called nymphs, can be anything from 7 mm to 35 mm long as they grow.
Males and females look almost exactly the same.
Most asked questions about Australian wood cockroach
?Is the Australian wood cockroach dangerous?
No. It does not bite or sting, and it lives in rotting logs in the forest, not in houses.
?How big is an Australian wood cockroach?
A grown-up is usually about 3.4 cm long, about as long as a matchbox.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Panesthia australis
- Group
- Cockroaches and termites
- Family
- Blaberidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Blattodea > Blaberidae
- Lives on
- Australia and Oceania
- Also known as
- Common wood cockroach
Where the facts come from
- Panesthia australis (Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0): what it looks like, where it lives, what it eats, sizes and fun facts, retold in simple words.
- Picture by (c) Andrew Allen, some rights reserved (CC BY). CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons. The sticker of this bug is drawn from this picture.
If we got something wrong, sorry, we are bug fans, not a science journal. Tell us at [email protected] and we will fix it.
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