Cockroaches are known for being stealthy and difficult to kill. A common belief is that if a nuclear war were to occur, cockroaches would be the only surviving life form left on the planet. In an effort to see if this is actually true, “Mythbusters” ran tests in which they used lethal doses of radiation to see if cockroaches would survive.
As part of their scientific study, two other insects were also blasted with radiation. Fruit flies and flower beetles were also subjected to various doses of radiation to see which, if any, would survive the blasts.
The interesting news is that all of the insects survived different levels of radiation, except the fruit flies which eventually died from natural causes (did they do a fly autopsy?). Humans that would be exposed to these levels of radiation would be history yet many of the insects survived the radiation blasts.
The most interesting result however is that despite the thought that cockroaches were the superbug that would inherit the earth in the event of a nuclear war, not necessarily true…or at least they would play second fiddle to another bug that did much better on the Mythbuster tests. As a surprise to everyone, the flower beetles had more surviving members than any other type of insect used in the study.
