April 13th, 2009 pianist
Tottori Cockroach, Adult Male, 1913 Dr.Dong holding speciemen
This Friday, I will be embarking along a trip of a lifetime. After much persuasion and convincing, The Director, Tomo, along with the board of companies, has approved of my trip into the unmarked zone down at the Tottori Sand Dunes, where the amazing cream white cockroaches thrive. Before you go googling them up, don’t. All you will get are white moulted skins of cockroaches found at the back of fridges.
The Tottori Cockroaches is a close relative of the common german cockroach which is found all over the world. They resemble closely to the international pest version but a little tad more sensible in their aesthetic evolution. From what I gather from the Institute’s documents in the 2003 expedition, they have found the cockroaches to be extremely toxic. This is due to their diet. They feed on the roots and leaves of the eastern Juniper which are extremely toxic. The zoologists are not able to figure out if the cockroaches have produced enzymes to detoxify the poisons of the plant, or the cockroaches simply poison their bodies and at the same time preserved their bodies from being eaten in the desert. It appears the enzymes of the poisonous leaves and roots cause the cockroaches to lose their yellow coloration slowly. A younger Tottori cockroach would appear more yellowish then a slightly older cockroach. It is not known if the young is born totally brown and lose their pigmentation as they age.
The origins of how the cockroaches came to be discovered are interesting. The research and re-discovery was one of the promising results of the Institute’s initiative to constantly break the barriers of art and science. One of the first artist in resident, Thomas Horniman, came across a picture of a white Tottori cockroach in the institute’s 200 year old archive in 1999. The photograph showed a white insect being held in the hands of the late Dr.Dong. Thinking nothing of it, he continued to browse through the archives. Thomas became more curious with Dr.Dong’s images as he dug deeper. In 1913, Dr.Dong made numerous trips to the Tottori Desert. As the archive was scattered in bits and pieces, Thomas couldn’t really make up what Dr.Dong was searching for in the desert. There were excavators and diggers all around his photographs. It had never occur to him that Dr.Dong was looking for the Tottori Cockroaches. It appears that Dr.Dong was aware of the presence of the species but had wanted to study the insect in its natural habitat at greater detail. Thomas later made the link with the first image after extensive translation and research was done on the documents.
There are no further documents after 1914 by Dr.Dong, artifacts of even specimens of the Tottori Cockroaches in the archive. Nobody really knew if Dr.Dong found anything from his expeditions.
And that was what Thomas wanted to know, to find out if Dr.Dong found anything more on the Tottori Cockroaches. In 2000, Thomas with 8 other zoologists set out to re-trace Dr.Dong’s expedition.
I had a chat with Thomas over the phone earlier, and he told me at that point of time, he felt like he was an archaeologist and a zoologist who had to remind himself he was an artist. He felt like an archaeologist looking for the forgotten city of Dr.Dong’s excavation grounds. He also felt like a zoologist looking for a lost and mythical creature. He kept in mind that his mission was to present these information and research with an aesthetic treatment different from science.
Thomas and his team manage to re-trace Dr.Dong’s exact excavation sites. It was only to be 2 years later that Thomas managed to capture a pure white adult specimen. Thomas had made 8 trips back to Tottori since his first trip. The reason they took so long to discover the adult speciemen was because whiter adults tend to dig as deep as 2 m below the surface of the ground and come out only very rarely at night and almost never in the day. “You would think that they were white to blend into the sand, but I realize they could also be white because they shun away from the sun for so long.”
A lot of specialized equipment was used to excavate a fully grown white Tottori cockroach from 2m below the sand. It was a lot of trail and error on the team to finally formulate a way to bring the cockroach back to the surface after locating one.
“We come across smaller and yellow ones throughout the night but we have always hoped to catch a pure white one, like the one in Dr.Dong’s image.” said Thomas. Today, Thomas is still mystified by how Dr.Dong managed to retrieve his Tottori cockroach in 1913. “You would have thought you wanted to share this knowledge and discovery with the rest of the world.”
And perhaps the unknowability of this discovery shall always stay within the walls of The Institute of Critical Zoologists. Like how all knowledge is created and shared and shaped by science, there are some that will shy away and survive to become myths. The Institute seems perfectly fine that the status of the Tottori cockroaches will remain this way. If you think that this is the decision of the companies funding the Institute to keep this a secret, think again. The decision for this closure was in fact a conscious decision by the directors at the Institute. The directors first weigh if the announcement of the discovery of the species is in anyway beneficial for its current survival as a species. Next they consider if the cockroaches really need to be discovered by humans.
“Seeing that the Tottori Sand Dunes gets trampled by 10am almost every day in the tourist swamped areas, the Institute was convinced that the community at large should not really know about them.” Thomas said that the knowledge was addictive as well. Within 2 months of their discovery of the first adult cockroach, the team dug up 498 others within the region. “Maybe Dr.Dong knew that sometimes an amazing discovery may not necessarily help a species at all, not when they have evolved to elude us humans.”
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