This is scientific American's 60 second science. I'm Christopher Intalyata. Got a minute?

Microbes play a huge role in our nutrition, our immunity, maybe even our mental health.

But we humans aren't the only ones that rely on these armies of resident bacteria.

Baby cockroaches, the cockroaches that just emerge from the egg don't have any gut bacteria.

That's Kobe Shal, an entomologist and chemical ecologist at North Carolina State University.

The first thing they do is they take a nice feces meal, eating the poop eating the feces of their

brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers.

Disgusting roaches.

Don't worry. That excrement inoculates the roaches with beneficial gut bugs, Shall says.

And it's also a longevity boosting nutritional supplement.

But the weirdest thing is, the poop actually calls the totts to come hither because it's laced with compounds like fatty acids that attract roaches of all ages

The substances are called aggregation pheromones, so poop essentially serves as a rallying call to congregate and feast.

To determine where the attractive chemicals come from,

Shahl and his colleagues raised a group of sterile,

microbe-free cockroaches, and then collected their excrement. But as they suspected,

the sterile stuff, without any microbial byproducts, failedannelize the other roaches.

So they then gave the sterile bugs of fecal transplant.

So we took feces of normal cockroaches and exposed sterile cockroaches to this species, they very

readily eat this species and they incorporate the microbes, the bacteria from this feces into their gut. And these cockroaches then produce

the aggregation pheromone again.

They published the findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. These results suggest gut

bacteria may do a lot more than we thought, including at least for roaches, aiding

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