No offense, but New York City's Upper West Side cockroaches are fine where they are, thanks. As are, it turns out, those found in all of the Big Apple's diverse neighborhoods. According to a new study led by researchers at the University of Rockefeller, New York's cockroaches like to stay in the neighborhood where they are born among those that are genetically familiar to themselves.
Sound familiar?
"Once they move in, they don't leave," Dr. Mark Stoeckle, a senior research associate told The Wall Street Journal. "This is a window into cockroach society and it is very much like our own."
Stoeckle has spent the last year soliciting the public for cockroach samples, receiving specimens from around the world, which he and his colleagues have examined.
The results show that a cockroach found on the Upper East side of Manhattan is genetically different than those found just across Central Park or, say, on Roosevelt Island.
Called the National Cockroach Project, the study increases the number of published sequences of roach DNA from 24 to more than 120, LiveScience reports.
New York City is home to greater cockroach diversity than anywhere else in the world, according to the study -- a direct result of the city's long history of absorbing large numbers of immigrants. The German cockroach, for example, is believed to have arrived with the earliest waves of European immigrants, the Journal reports, while the American cockroach likely came from tropical Africa aboard slave ships.
Based on the results, Scott Miller, a curator and entomologist for the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, told the news outlet that the cockroach populations in New York provide a "parallel to the human immigrant story."