Nicole Pruess was looking through a plastic bin full of more than 100 Madagascar hissing cockroaches in early March at the Sophia M. Sachs Butterfly House when she saw one that was very different from the others.
The roach almost looked like two bugs in one. It had a line down its back and was perfectly split with two colorings; one side was dark brown while the other was light caramel with faded stripes.
“I saw him and I was like, ‘Oh, my gosh, that's so cool, I’ve never seen anything like it before,’” said Pruess, an invertebrate keeper at the Butterfly House.
Butterflies sometimes emerge from their chrysalises presenting as half male, half female. Pruess keeps an eye out for the phenomenon because it is “very rare, very special.”
But this cockroach takes it a step further. He seems to be male on both sides, which could mean he has two different sets of DNA — basically two cockroaches in one body.
Right away, Pruess and her colleague Chris Hartley started asking around to see if anyone had heard of this before.
“We reached out to the scientific community and the insectarium community, and none of them had ever seen anything like this in a hissing cockroach before,” said Hartley, manager of living collections, education and facilities at the Butterfly House.
Hartley and Pruess also checked the literature to see if there was any documentation of this having happened. They read up on chimeras, which are organisms with two distinct sets of DNA, and found there are records of chimeras in which both DNA are male. But so far, they haven’t found evidence of another roach like this one.
“People are very excited,” Hartley said. “We have talked to some other professionals in the field who have just geeked out over this to the extreme.”
The scientists decided to name the roach Harvey, after the DC Comics character Two-Face. They agree he seems to be “a very chill dude” and is happy to be held by both keepers and curious journalists.
“Harvey is very relaxed,” Hartley said. “The hissing cockroach as a species is not typically high-strung, I would say, but they are known for hissing, right? So Harvey hasn't shown signs of being, like, an aggressive hisser.”
There is still a lot to discover about Harvey. It’s possible the male/male chimera is more common than the community realizes but just usually isn’t as visually dramatic as it is in Harvey, said Pruess.
“Now we are starting to reach out to researchers at universities and things like that to get an idea of just how rare it really is,” she said.
The mutant cockroach is not currently on public display because of his potential scientific significance, but Hartley hopes Harvey will eventually become an ambassador for his often misunderstood species, helping people see the important role cockroaches play in the world.
“If you've only had experiences with roaches in your house, I certainly understand why you don't like them,” Hartley said. “But we love having bugs like Harvey who can show you that there's a fascinating side to these animals.”
