Canberra's cockroaches more apparent due to wet and stormy weather
Noticed a few extra mouths to feed in the kitchen recently? Flash flooding in Canberra last month has driven the capital's cockroaches indoors.
ACT Pest Control's Carl Ibrahim said he'd recently received an unusually high number of callouts for German cockroaches, the smaller ones you typically see indoors, but otherwise it was business as usual.
ACT Pest Control's Carl Ibrahim says there's been a big build up of German cockroaches this year. Photo: Dion Georgopoulos
"German cockroaches usually come in from Sydney anyway because they come in from fruit boxes," Mr Ibrahim said.
"But normal cockroaches, I ain't seeing that much of an increase in them."
German cockroaches differ from the garden variety roaches and will be attracted to food crumbs in the house, living anywhere dark and moist.
"These guys require special treatment," Mr Ibrahim said.
The trick to getting roaches wasn't a repellent but rather a gel to make the cockroaches spread the chemical round.
Insect physiologist Dr Paul Cooper from the ANU's Research School of Biology said the humid weather would have made the cockroaches more active, making us more aware of their presence.
"That's why they're more active at night because humidity goes up at night," Dr Cooper said.
"The larvae do better under a slightly higher humidity, that's why Sydney is the cockroach capital."
But Dr Cooper said there had been no unusual increase in Canberra's population of the German cockroach or Blatella germanica.
"Because of the high storms they emerge from areas they might have been hiding in, that would also make them more apparent even though they haven't gone up in numbers."
With the winter approaching, Canberrans can expect to see less of the unwelcome house guests; Dr Cooper said the cold temperatures slowed them down or killed them off.
Mr Ibrahim said there had been a high number of termites this year.
"The problem with Canberrans is they don't think about termites at all," he said.
Mr Ibrahim said Canberrans should be getting their properties inspected every year for termites but some were leaving it every four or five years, when it's often too late.
"If you do it once a year you'll catch them in time," Mr Ibrahim said.