Roach reflexes

I've told you about the spectacle that is the Great Insect Fair Cockroach Races. Roaches are impressive runners. Apparently the fastest roach ever recorded sprinted at an amazing 3.4 miles per hour, which, when you're only 2 inches long, is lickety-split.

Perhaps you have had the surreal experience of being sure that you have stamped on an offending cockroach, only to find that he has Houdini'd his way out from under your shoe and is now across the room and disappearing under your fridge. How is it- you ask yourself- that roach-kind has invented teleportation?

Roaches, it turns out, have mastered the art of escape not with magic, but with fast reflexes.

Cockroaches are characterized by the presence of two appendages called cerci (SIR-see, singular cercus) on their last abdominal segment (read: butt). In many species, the cerci are covered with delicate sensory hairs for chemoreception or mechanoreception and act kind of like antennae for the rear end of the insect. The cerci of cockroaches are exceptionally sensitive. They are sensitive enough to pick up the tiny air currents created by your foot sweeping toward them threateningly. The sensitive cerci send a signal up the ventral nerve chord directly to the nerve center of the thorax controlling the roach's legs. Only three neurons stand between the cerci and the legs. Accordingly, the roach can react in less than 70 milliseconds. A blink of an eye is 300-400 milliseconds.

It is grace, is it not, that God gives cockroaches this kind of speed? They are universally hated and feared, constantly persecuted by stomping feet or chemical warfare. But at least the cockroach has been given the reflexes to escape from impending doom with near-clairvoyant speed.