Domino Cockroach

The doomsday clock is 85 seconds to midnight, which means there’s a good chance we could all be dead tomorrow. But can you really say you’ve lived if you haven’t seen a domino cockroach? After all, they’ll out-survive us anyway. The best way to describe them is to pretend a 5-year-old captured a regular black beetle, suffocated it in a jar of gasoline, and painted white spots on it as an art project. Just dabbed the little fucker with whiteout 6 or 7 times. Now, would it still have 6 or 7 spots if the scrub forests of southern India where they live were blanked with ultra-concentrated radioactive fallout? Or would it have 19 spots, 47 legs, and enough sentience to team up with its friends and drive a tuk-tuk in a mad dash across the deserted streets of Delhi? Who’s to judge. Evolutionary biologists, probably, who already cast the domino beetle as another cheap mimic of a more fearsome creature—in this case, the six-spot ground beetle. Point being, when the bombs go off, sometimes it’s the fakers who survive.