They can move up to fifty body lengths per second. If we could do this, we could do a one-hundred dash in just a second and run over 360 kilomters per hour, faster than a cheetah. The cockroach can also hold its breath for 14 minutes and live for a month without food. They have been on earth for over four hundred million years, and have four thousand different species of cockroach. To help them slide into cracks and crevices, their bodies are coated with grease, which can have its drawbacks. The fall has lost this one a leg. It's a common injury, but the cockroach will easily survive until it starts to grow a new leg in just two weeks.

   Whether or not a cockroach can survive a nuclear war, one thing is certain, they would fare a lot better than a smith family. Doses of radiation which damage human tissue are measued in rams. It would take eight hundred rams to kill a smith and over fifty thousand to kill a cockroach. A cockroach can live through a blast in a microwave and it also has an ingenious in-built ability to sense danger and alarm in its backside. Tiny hairs on the rum detect the minutest changes in the airflow, like a foot trudging down to crush its head. When it comes to vacuum cleaners, a backside warning system backfire. As air rushes up towards the vacuum, cockroaches think there is an attack from the front and spin around to escape.