If something's bugging you about cockroaches -- and what wouldn't? -- a UMass professor's website is the place with answers.

A column in the St. Petersburg Times newspaper in Florida last Friday tapped in to Joseph G. Kunkel's online roach-a-pedia to answer the question: "Why is it that whenever I find a dead cockroach, it is upside down?"

According to Kunkel, most cockroaches only seem to die on their backs, the newspaper reported, because in fact most expire when they are targeted by predators like bats and birds, which find them a good protein source.

However, when the bugs get inside homes, they have trouble negotiating slippery floors and can die trying, unsuccessfully, to right themselves if they turn onto their backs. (Just ask Gregor Samsa.)

Add to that scenario the fact that cockroaches that ingest insecticides may flip over due to the effect of the nerve poisons such products contain.

As Margot Clearly of the Gazette explained in a Hampshire Life story in 2009, Kunkel has been delving most recently into the question of a shell disease afflicting lobsters off the coast of New England, trading, as she put it, “the crispy casings of cockroaches, the crunchy shells of lobsters.”

Still, Kunkel maintains a seemingly exhaustive set (80, so far) of frequently asked questions about cockroaches, with answers to queries like: Can cockroaches predict earthquakes?
How can I tell if a cockroach is breathing? Where did the cockroach get its name?

And my favorite: Do cockroaches have emotions?

Which begs the follow-up: Does anyone care?

Kunkel, a biology professor, collects more than straight facts on cockroaches.

His site offers up a full version of Muriel Rukeyser's poem "St. Roach," which begins:

For that I never knew you, I only learned to dread you,

for that I never touched you, they told me you are filth,
they showed me by every action to despise your kind;
for that I saw my people making war on you,
I could not tell you apart, one from another,
for that in childhood I lived in places clear of you,
for that all the people I knew met you by
crushing you, stamping you to death, they poured boiling
water on you, they flushed you down,
for that I could not tell one from another
only that you were dark, fast on your feet, and slender.

Not like me.