The terror of the hissing cockroach

SALISBURY — Turtles are pleasant creatures. They don’t bother anybody, and they look cute peeking out of their shells.

Bearded dragons don’t breathe fire, knights of yore don’t pursue them, and if you think about it, they are really just a sort of super-newt.

But the hissing cockroach of Madagascar? This is a creature to be reckoned with.

Benjamin Stafford of the Forest Park Zoo in Springfield, Mass., visited the Scoville Memorial Library on Saturday, June 13, with an assortment of animals suitable for being shown to small children.

The painted turtle, named Picasso, lives in and around water, Stafford explained to his (mostly) very young audience.

This is in sharp contrast to the zoo’s tortoise, named Goliath, which lives in a desert setting.

One of the children asked how to tell if a turtle is a boy or a girl.

Stafford said, “It’s hard to tell sometimes. We have a bird at the zoo, named Jack” he continued. “One day he laid an egg. So he’s a girl.”

Stafford said if you see a turtle crossing the road, help it along by picking it up and placing it farther along in the direction it was traveling.

If you put the turtle back where it started, it will simply start crossing the road again.

While he was saying this, Picasso, perhaps sensing that the opportunity would not arise again, made a dash for freedom on the carpeted floor of the Wardell Community Room.

Picasso’s will cannot be questioned. It would be hard to find a painted turtle with a more determined expression.

However, turtles are not sprinters. Handicapped by short legs and a uniformly placid attitude, a dashing turtle cuts a pace that could be kindly referred to as “glacial.”

Only when pitted against other turtles may variations in speed and class be determined.

The bearded dragon, while not in the same class as the economy-sized, medieval-type dragon as slain by St. George, was nonetheless about as long as Stafford’s forearm and not the sort of thing you’d want to run into unexpectedly.

The dragon, somewhat cloyingly named Puff, obligingly puffed his neck, causing mild alarm among the youngsters.

The unquestioned star of the show were the two unnamed Madasgascar hissing cockroaches.

Each was as big as a man’s thumb, and extremely good at clinging to Stafford.

And they do, in fact, hiss. The sound is like an escape of gas from a very small pipe.

While two cockroaches hissing is simply an interesting phenomenon, one of nature’s more unusual duets, Stafford said that several hundred of the creatures going at once is another matter.

“That’s reallllly scary,” he said to the children.