You must not live with cockroaches if you feel no need to stop them.

Lots of large ones in Australia. Regularly seen them fly to our apartment in Sydney. Hate those things and I don't miss them at all in Europe.

There's two types, though. The big brown bush cockroaches seem clean and pretty smart, and I really don't mind them. The shiny black ones (some with white dots) that infest your white goods? Those are filthy.

The big redish black ones, they are solitary and thank God for that. Luckily, never seen the small ones that infest in swarms.

Where do you live in Europe that doesn't have roaches? I live in Greece and the cities are infested with them during summer.

I've never seen once in Finland. When I lived in the UK I'd never seen one in the wild either, for that matter.

wait for the global warming to unroll...

Germany, Austria, Slovakia, Switzerland. We saw very few when we were living right next to a forest. In a city, it meant you either have bad neighbours (could be a construction site across the street), or your place is filthy :)

Friends at university said they have plenty in dorms, but a visit made it self-explanatory.

I've read yesterday that in some cities you have to inform authorities if you see a cockroach, and that's a law.

Inside the US, they seem to be present in large numbers in the deep south (FL through TX). Are they present in the southwest as well?

Here in DC, we get them, but generally only in homes that aren't kept clean - which can a problem in large apartment buildings, as it only takes one slovenly neighbor or poorly tended garbage area to let a colony grow and become a visible nuisance.

And what about Europe? Probably too cold in most of the continent, but present in Mediterranean regions?

"And what about Europe? Probably too cold in most of the continent, but present in Mediterranean regions?"

As with other areas they live in or near garbage areas, but as far as I can tell not as common as one could think. I don't recall seeing any for example during garbage collecting emergencies. They could be present in homes though, especially old ones where small cracks in concrete or wood can offer a place to hide. That was the case of a 4th floor apartment I lived in over 30 years back where we were never able to find the source of those bastards. That wasn't an invasion, just 2 or 3 a week, so we weren't that pressured to call for someone to eradicate them. The solution came totally unexpected: one day my father brought a cat into that house and from that moment although we keep finding those 2 or 3 cockroaches per week, they were dead. Some time passed by, and one day I found the cat scratching near a baseboard corner; he just found the small crack the roaches used to live in and killed all those coming out of it. We sealed the crack and never saw a cockroach after that. I moved two times since then, and although my father kept that cat, I soon got two, and besides being wonderful companions, they kill anything entering the house uninvited, including bigger nasty mosquitos.

Apparently, apartment blocks in Russia used to have a massive cockroach problem in the 90s, but then they all suddenly completely disappeared in 2000s and never came back. Nobody seems to know why.

A little fun anecdata from the US, I've noticed cockroaches get much bigger the further south you go: Upper Midwest, Michigan, Ohio, the biggest cockroaches get up to about one inch. Central Midwest, southern Kansas/Missouri/Illinois, two inches. Texas and the gulf? Three inches.

That's definitely true. We get the little ones here. The big guys found in the humid/hot south are scary.

Don't think I've ever seen a cockroach in my life living in Europe.

Seems like a U.S exclusive bug.

They are rampart in the Mediterranean area. I don't think I've ever been to a holiday resort there where I didn't see them.

I lived in Italy for two years. At some point I had them in my appartment. It was not too hard to get rid of them using some poison.... Apparently they had come from the appartment next to me or that is what the landlady said....

They are everywhere in Greece

I'm not sure anyone is suggesting we destroy every last living cockroach on the planet. This is more about keeping them out of living/sleeping/food areas. They can carry disease, for one thing. These aren't things you want freely crawling around a restaurant kitchen, for example. It's no different than not wanting your home to become infested with bees, or ants, or anything else that's also very important to our world.

I raise roaches, they are amazing critters! They eat two apples, a banana, an orange, and two cups of dogfood in only five days or so. No skin, peel, stem, or seeds leftover after!

They are kind of fascinating once you get over the creepy factor.

The main problem is that, like rodents, they can be a major health hazard as passive disease carriers. A pet rat is as different from a wild rat as a pet roach is as different from a wild roach.

Very true. I also raise Dubia roaches, which are very different to those common in the western world

How many would eat all that? What about their waste how big would it be?

So I have about three hundred at any given time. As for waste, I don't worry too much, like fish the young eat the feces of the adults. In the last six months or so the 60gallon tubperware they live in has accumulated enough wase to cover the bottom about an inch deep or so

You have 300 roaches in a 60 gallon tub? Are you raising them as food for something else or just for fun? I'm certainly not one of the "eww roaches" people but I have to say I don't see the appeal myself ;)

I have a lot of very hungry reptiles, I rescue unwanted lizards and turtles.

They are disease ridden and a health hazard.