The Terrifying Math
What Mark didn’t understand was the math of infestation. A single cockroach egg case can hold anywhere from 16 to 50 eggs. Let’s assume the one Mark crushed had about 40 viable embryos. By crushing the mom, he didn’t kill the babies; he essentially performed an emergency C-section, freeing them from the mother’s body just before she died.
If even 20 of those babies survived the initial stomp and the subsequent cleanup, that is 20 new cockroaches living in his walls. But it’s not just about 20 bugs. It’s about what happens next. These nymphs grow fast. In ideal conditions—like a warm kitchen with plenty of crumbs—they can reach maturity quickly. And once they reach maturity, the reproduction cycle begins again, this time multiplied by twenty.