A 12-Year-Old's Roach Obsession

Meet Shelby Counterman (right) – she’s a 12-year-old from Tulsa, Oklahoma in the US and she collects cockroaches. 

 

She started with only five and now, her collection is made up of about 5,000 roaches, and which includes 17 different species. She likes them close and so, she keeps them in tanks in her bedroom.

 

She confesses her favorite is the Simandoa cave roach (Scientific name: Simandoa conserfariam), a species of cockroach that is believed to be extinct in the wild. However, it is kept as a pet by insect hobbyists and is therefore not considered completely extinct.

 

In the video, two species are featured – the Dubia roach (Scientific name: Blaptica dubia), a tropical species of cockroach originally native to South and Central America and the Madagascar hissing cockroach (Scientific name: Gromphadorhina portentosa), a wingless cockroach from Madagascar, off the coast of Africa. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Shelby knows that most people don’t understand her passion. “When someone says they’re gross, I explain that there are 4,500 roach species in the world and only a handful of them are bad for humans”, she says. “I want people to understand that roaches actually help us and play an important role in our ecosystem. They are decomposers. They eat garbage and other waste. They have a job to do”. 

 

FYI, just 30 cockroach species are considered pests.