Common cockroach
Reborn as a common cockroach, you would spend your days wedged into a crack behind the boiler and your nights patrolling a kitchen floor that humans believe is empty.
Your address: the basement
The common or oriental cockroach (Blatta orientalis) is the glossy, dark-brown roach of cellars, drains and the ground floors of old apartment blocks. Unlike its smaller cousin the German cockroach, which loves warm kitchens, it prefers cool, damp places – pipe ducts, sewers, crawl spaces and the gap under a leaking sink. You would be about 2–3 cm long, flat enough to slip into a crack the thickness of a coin, and almost entirely nocturnal: a light switching on is the closest thing you have to an earthquake.
Neither sex can fly. Males have wings covering most of the abdomen; females have only short stubs. You get around on six fast, spiny legs and steer by two long antennae that taste and smell everything they touch.
A menu without standards
Cockroaches are true omnivores. Crumbs, grease, spilled beer, pet food, paper glue, dead insects, hair and rotting organic matter all count as dinner, and you can go weeks without food if water is available. Water matters more: oriental cockroaches dry out easily, which is why they cluster wherever pipes sweat or drip.
Family life is efficient rather than tender. A female forms a purse-shaped egg case, the ootheca, holding around sixteen eggs, carries it for a day or two and then drops or glues it in a sheltered spot. The nymphs that hatch look like small wingless adults and moult repeatedly over months before reaching maturity.
Toughness, myth and reality
The legend says cockroaches would inherit a nuclear wasteland. They do tolerate radiation several times better than humans, mainly because their cells divide only during moults, but many other insects outperform them. What really keeps them going is ordinary resilience: they eat almost anything, hide superbly and reproduce steadily. Your life would most likely end with a pesticide bait, a shoe, a hungry spider or simply old age after several months as an adult.
