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Jiminy Cricket! Just What We Need: A Cockroach That Jumps

By Mark Memmott
Published December 14, 2011 at 9:55 AM CST
Incoming! This photo supplied by the Unversity of Cape Town shows a Cape cockroach that can jump. The "leaproach" was discovered in South Africa's Table Mountain National Park.
Mike Picker, University of Cape Town
/
AP
Incoming! This photo supplied by the Unversity of Cape Town shows a Cape cockroach that can jump. The "leaproach" was discovered in South Africa's Table Mountain National Park.

We should have jumped on this story earlier, but it's too creepy not to mention:

Scientists have discovered a cockroach in South Africa that leaps to get around, according to Biology Letters.

The University of Cape Town reseachers rather dryly go on to say that the jumping "differs from all other extant cockroaches that have a scuttling locomotion."

Apparently the little guys are about four-tenths of an inch long, but can bound about 20 inches in a single jump. That's 50 times their length. They're not just leaproaches, as some are calling them. They're Superroaches.

This video of a leaproach jumping in slow motion may give some of you the willies.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Mark Memmott
Mark Memmott is NPR's supervising senior editor for Standards & Practices. In that role, he's a resource for NPR's journalists – helping them raise the right questions as they do their work and uphold the organization's standards.
See stories by Mark Memmott