Meet Cristian Lucañas, the Philippines' only cockroach specialist, who goes by the title "Cockroach Lord." When he tells people what he does, the reaction is usually a mix of shock and confusion. "The majority would actually be questioning why," says the 32-year-old researcher at the University of the Philippines Los Baños. One person, apparently perplexed by the insects' very existence, asked: "Did God create cockroaches?" Others just want advice on how to kill them.
Cockroaches have a serious PR problem. They've repeatedly been ranked among the most hated insects on the planet - even more disliked than mosquitoes, which kill hundreds of thousands of people each year. The loathing is ancient: Egyptians used spells to chase away "vile" cockroaches, and there's a whole phobia named after them: katsaridaphobia.
Lucañas insists cockroaches are misunderstood. Sure, the ones scuttling across your kitchen floor - usually German or American cockroaches - are unsightly. But they represent just a tiny fraction of the thousands of species worldwide. "They're not a good representative for the other cockroaches," he says.
Most cockroaches don't even live near humans. In the Philippines, they thrive deep in caves and forests, where Lucañas spends his time observing behavior and hunting for undescribed species. They recycle waste into nutrients, serve as prey for lizards and birds, and some even pollinate plants or disperse seeds. They're basically nature's cleanup crew, minus the gratitude.
Lucañas didn't plan to become the Cockroach Lord. He wanted to study fish, but a professor nudged him toward insects. In 2013, as an undergraduate, he found an undescribed gold-colored cockroach in caves in Burdeos, Polillo Island. He named it Nocticola gonzalezi, after his professor Juan Carlos T Gonzalez. Informally, it's called the gold cockroach, a nod to the legend that Japanese soldiers buried looted gold in the Philippines during World War II.
Since then, Lucañas has described eight more Philippine species and co-described six others, bestowing some with names inspired by Tolkien and Pokémon characters. Because why not? Cockroaches come in a rainbow of colors - vivid blue, light green, metallic shades - and some look like beetles, roll into balls, or jump like crickets.
Take the genus Perisphaerus: females feed their young by letting the babies puncture their armpits and stick their heads inside to feed on blood. It's like breastfeeding, but with more exoskeleton and less warm fuzzies.
Then there are termites - a "eusocial" cockroach species. They're just as industrious and organized as ants, but get a worse rap because they eat houses. In forests, though, they're essential decomposers, breaking down wood so nutrients return to the soil. Without them, the ecosystem would be stuck with a bunch of dead logs and no way to recycle.
The household cockroach's reputation for indestructibility is well earned - they can survive greasy pizza or even human hair. But non-household cockroaches in the Philippines are far more fragile. Global heating and habitat destruction from development and mining are taking a toll.
"There are still a lot of things that we don't know yet," says Lucañas. Meanwhile, invertebrates are dying out at alarming rates, but conservation money mostly goes to charismatic animals like pandas and tigers.
In 2019, the Philippines listed two cave-dwelling cockroach species as endangered - the Antipolo blind cave cockroach (Nocticola caeca) and Simon's cave cockroach (Nocticola simoni) - plus five species as vulnerable. It was the first time cockroaches made the list, mostly because we just didn't have enough data before.
There are at least 130 known cockroach species in the Philippines, and Lucañas suspects many more await discovery. "Do we have more of these pollinators or seed-dispersing species that we don't know yet? What other roles can cockroaches play?" He's full of questions, and we're sure the answers will be just as surprising as a cockroach that breastfeeds.
This article is part of the Guardian's Invertebrate of the Year series, running from August 3-12, profiling amazing invertebrates nominated by readers. Voting opens after the series. Contact environment.desk@theguardian.com with 'Invertebrate' in the subject line.