I watched an interesting video on YouTube today. It was about an experiment involving 3 types of insects, namely cockroaches, fruit flies and flour beetles. All of them are exposed to 3 levels of radiation:1000 Rads, 10,000 Rads and 100,000 Rads
The lethal dose for human is 1000 Rads, virtually no human can survive at that kind of radiation exposure. But at 10 times that exposure (10, 000 Rads), 30%of cockroaches are still kicking. At 1000 Rads, 50 % are still alive. That’s pretty amazing, as expected, cockroaches out survives human in terms of radiation exposure, that’s confirmed.
However, fruit flies and flour beetles performed even better. Flour beetles, in particular, survived the highest dose, which is 100,000 Rads, At this level of radiation, none of the cockroaches survive but there was still 10 % of flour beetles survived after that kind of exposure.
Conclusion, if there is a nuclear blast, all the insects above will out survive human. But the strongest of all is not cockroach, it is actually flour beetles.
Although this experiment shows that flour beetle is the strongest, but I still think that cockroach is the strongest of all. The reason is because this experiment tested only 1 variable. Survival is not about withstanding radiation alone, it’s a multiple factorial thing. The fact that cockroaches can feed on a wide variety of food (even the gum of a stamp!), their mechanical strength (they can survive even if you hit them, the only way to kill is to crush them!), etc make them a better candidate of survival.
