Bufflehead Cabin

The microbe Blattobacterium genes that code for enzymes that break down urea and ammonia, the components of uric acid. Other genes instruct the microbe to take the resulting molecules and use them to make amino acids, repair cell walls and membranes, and perform other metabolic tasks.

This allows cockroaches to subsist on nitrogen-poor diets, an ability “critical to the ecological range and global distribution of the cockroach species,” write the researchers. And what a range it is: There are nearly 5,000 species of cockroaches, spread on every continent, even Antarctica.

Blattobacterium also helps free cockroaches from the need to urinate, said study co-author Srinivas Kambhampati, a Kansas State University entomologist. In humans and other terrestrial animals, otherwise toxic uric acid is diluted with water, then flushed from the body as urine. Cockroaches save that water. Compared to them, the iconic stillsuits worn by the fictional Fremen of Dune would be wasteful.