Why Do Cockroaches Flip Over When They Die?
I am, I'll happily admit, passively curious about practically everything. But even so, this question does seem to test the outer limits of things an economist should ponder:
Why do cockroaches flip over when they die?
I don't remember when I started the practice of asking my students to ask me five random questions at the end of each class, but it has been a while. Five years at least, possibly (and hopefully!) more.
Until now, my all time favorite random question was "Melody itni chocolatey kyon hai?". Well ok, it was a close race between this one and my other favorite, which is "Were Ross and Rachel on a break?".
But this year, at the summer camp in Genwise, I got a question that trumps all others, by far:
Why do cockroaches flip over when they die?
What makes for a great random question?
This, as it turns out, is a great random question to ask. What is my criteria for determining that a random question is great? What is yours?
I'm curious to hear from all of you, but here are my answers to the question (the meta one about great random questions, not my answer to the cockroach question!):
It shouldn't be a question about a specific person, least of all about me
It should be a question that is broadly applicable, and learning about the answer should surprise me at the margin
Thinking about it and answering it should prove to be a whole lot of fun
And one of my students at the Genwise Summer Camp asked a question that has shot to the top my personal charts. It is the title of today's blog post, and I loved it.
Why do they flip over when they die, dammit?
As you can see, it is not about a specific person, it is broadly applicable and I fully expect to be surprised about the answer, whatever the answer may be. And lord knows I've had a lot of fun thinking about the question and asking it to other people.
Those other people, by the way, included some of my colleagues at that summer camp. There was a computer scientist, a professor of neurology, a physicist - and this is very far from being a complete list. None of us had any expertise in cockroaches, less still any expertise in why they die the way they die. But all of us were fascinated by the question, of course.
And it turns out that one of us (the professor of neurology, if you're wondering) had asked this question when they were a student. Maybe, our leading hypothesis now said, their legs can no longer support their body when they are about to die, and so they flip over.
Yeah, maybe.
But hang on a second, the computer scientist said. That doesn't make sense. If their legs can no longer support their body (which is plausible enough), how on earth do the legs get enough energy to flip the whole body over?
Yeah, good question, we said, and we went back to scratching our heads. And a combination of scratching our heads, asking ChatGPT and Google has helped us come up with this answer:
When cockroaches die, they lose control over their muscles, and this causes their legs to curl in inwards uncontrollably. This can result in they flipping over.
Maybe neurotoxins cause muscle spasms, so poisons used to kill cockroaches have something to do with it?
Smooth surfaces at homes may make flipping back more difficult?
I don't have the faintest idea about whether the real explanation is any one of these by itself, or a combination of these, or something else also needs to be in the list. My current understanding is that it is mostly the first of these, but I cannot wait to be authoritatively corrected by one of you. In fact, I positively look forward to it.
But I hope you agree: what a truly great random question, no?
And so my revised and updated top 3, for the moment, in a ascending order of awesomeness:
3. Were Ross and Rachel on a break?
2. Melody itni chocolatey kyon hai?
1. Why do cockroaches flip over when they die?
And for all our sakes, I hope I get to update this list soon. You'll hear about it whenever it happens, promise!