American cockroaches typically recognize chemical cues from their neighboring cockroach friends, and utilize these signals to act as a group and make self-organized choices. Self organization complements the preexisting environmental signals and coexists with status levels between the insects such as leader/worker relationships. Halloy and coworkers claim to have socially integrated cockroach-sized robots into a cockroach collective. How was this achieved? You guessed correctly--through chemistry! Basically by extracting and characterizing the hydrocarbons found in the cockroaches' exoskeleton, researchers identified compounds that were key in inter-cockroach recognition. By coating the robots in these extracts (which included compounds such as 6,9-heptacosadiene and 3-methylpentacosane), cockroaches accepted these robots and, even more amazingly, allowed the robots to influence decisions made by the cockroach community.
My only question is who got to perform the extraction of the cockroach exoskeleton into dichloromethane? That just sounds pretty icky to me.
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