Brown cockroach

The brown cockroach (Periplaneta brunnea) is a species of cockroach in the family Blattidae. It is probably originally native to Africa, but today it has a circumtropical distribution, having been widely introduced.[1] In cooler climates it can only survive indoors,[2] and it is considered a household pest.[1]

Brown cockroach
Scientific classification
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Arthropoda
Class: Insecta
Order: Blattodea
Family: Blattidae
Genus: Periplaneta
Species:
P. brunnea
Binomial name
Periplaneta brunnea
Synonyms
  • Periplaneta concolor Walker, 1868
  • Periplaneta patens Walker, 1868
  • Periplaneta truncata Krauss, 1892
  • Periplaneta ignota Shaw, 1925

This cockroach is similar in appearance to the American cockroach (P. americana), but darker in color and with thicker, wider, triangular cerci. It is a reddish-brown color and has fully developed wings.[2] It reaches up to 4 centimeters in length.[1]

It produces an ootheca about 1.2 to 1.6 centimeters long containing about 24 eggs on average.[3]

It is an omnivore.[2]

References
  1. Periplaneta brunnea, Brown Cockroach. Cook Islands Biodiversity Database. The Cook Islands Natural Heritage Trust. 2007.
  2. Periplaneta brunnea (Burmeister, 1838). Archived November 15, 2012, at the Wayback Machine Orthopteroids of the British Isles Recording Scheme.
  3. Periplaneta brunnea Burmeister, 1838. PaDIL.
  • Black and white photographs of top view of P. brunnea male and female specimens, from Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections.
  • Drawings of body parts of male P. brunnea; plate VII, figures 12-16 show detail of the pronotum, end of abdomen with cerci, genital process, subgenital plate, and supra-anal plate with cerci. From a 1917 article[1] by Morgan Hebard, with a key to the figures on page 280.


  1. Hebard, Morgan (1917). "The Blattidae of North America north of the Mexican boundary". Memoirs of the American Entomological Society. 2: 1–284.
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