Cockroach cafeteria.

Find out how one New York school got rid of its unwanted lunch guests.

Imagine finding a cockroach swimming in your fruit cup or mashed in the middle of your mac-'n'-cheese. You'd probably drop your lunch and go running for the X-Terminator!

That's what officials at one Long Island, N.Y., school did when they realized cockroaches had taken over their cafeteria. They called Bernard Wendell, a professional pest-control operator at Arrow Exterminating.

"The problem was so bad," admits Wendell, he had to consult an entomologist, a bug scientist. Entomologists know all there is to know about insects: their anatomy, rates of reproduction, survival techniques--the kind of knowledge that comes in handy when it comes to de-roaching. Armed with the roaches' secrets of success, Wendell and his X-Terminator team headed for the school.

As luck would have it, the creepy critters were hiding when the team arrived. Good thing Wendell has a sensitive nose. "When there's a heavy roach infestation I can smell the roaches," he says. "Roach fecal matter has a particular odor."

After sniffing around the cafeteria for a while, the roach detectives found tiny brown flecks (roach droppings!) on electrical outlets behind the deep fryer. "The roaches were living inside and around the outlets," feeding on grease behind the stove, Wendell says.

Now that Wendell knew where the roaches were living, he had to figure out how to get rid of them without contaminating the cafeteria with pesticides. If roach "bombs" or sprayed pesticides got into the rice pudding, a whole school of kids could get sick.

RAAAIIID!

Even with the most powerful roach-busting techniques, Wendell says, controlling a bug infestation can be tricky. Like the world's nearly one million other known insect species, roaches have been evolving for some 350 million years. During that time, they've developed a host of adaptations, traits that help them survive.

For one thing, roaches have some pretty nifty ways of finding the food they need. They poke around and "sniff" out food using their long antennae. Then they take a precautionary taste with taste buds on their feet. If they like what they step in--and they usually do--they'll scarf it down with their chewing mouth parts. Cookie crumbs, human hair, glue off a stamp, even dead roach friends make an ample meal for these scavengers. Roaches would probably eat the ink off this page if you left it where they could find it.

But if roaches were constantly hunting for food out in the open, they wouldn't survive very long. They'd get smashed by shoes, done in by pesticides, or eaten by predators.

One thing that helps roaches outwit all these threats is their incredible speed. (Ever try to catch up with one and crush it under a copy of SW?) The critters also have the ability to slither into tiny crevices to escape. One common household species, the German cockroach, even has a slick oil coating that enables it to slip through micro-thin cracks in walls.

Besides, says Paul Bello, an urban entomologist in Atlanta, Georgia, roaches are nocturnal. They're most active at night--when you're not around. And they usually flee when you flick on the lights.

While you're not looking, roaches spend most of their time behind walls . . . breeding. A single roach pair can produce up to 500 offspring a year, Bello says.

All these adaptations might make Wendell's battle against the cafeteria's roaches seem hopeless. Fortunately, the X-Terminator knows how to turn roaches' needs against them.

First, he recommended that the area behind the stove and fryer be steam-cleaned to remove the grease, the roaches' primary food source. Then he went in for the kill. "I chose an effective pesticide' [called MRF2000] that was also environmentally friendly," Wendell says. "Most important, I figured out where to put it:" inside the electrical outlets and holes in the metal feet of the stove--where roaches were likely to nest.

Next, Wendell set sticky traps in various areas of the kitchen. If he found dead roaches in the traps, he'd know that his methods were working. (Live roaches stuck to the traps obviously hadn't eaten the bait.)

A few days later, Wendell returned to the cafeteria to check his progress. "There were roaches both dead and alive in the sticky traps," he says, "so I knew the bait was starting to take effect."

Wendell repeated the process of applying bait and setting traps for the next few weeks "until there weren't any more roaches in the traps," he says. The whole process took about a month, but it was worth the effort. The school's "roach problem is under control now," Wendell says.

What will Wendell do if the roaches return--as they so often do? Like the Terminator, the X-Terminator says, "I'll be back."

Eco-friendly roach control

Bug killers are turning to safe and environmentally clean roach-ridding methods, including natural predators like the gecko, above. Here are some other techniques:

* Your shoe: Safe, but messy and not too effective. Roaches are fast.

* The big cleanup: Keeping food in tightly closed containers and cleaning up grease reduces bugs' food supply.

* Boric acid powder: Effective roach killer. Though toxic, won't get into air or your food if placed properly in roach "hangouts," such as cracks in walls.

* Bait traps: Contain very low concentrations of insecticide in small, partly closed containers; won't expose kids and pets to harmful chemicals.

* Roach Motels: Snag roaches on sticky surfaces. Could help you find a roach "highway" but might not kill a lot of bugs.

* High-frequency sound generators: Repel roaches with insect equivalent of blackboard scratching. Method hasn't yet proved effective.

* Parasitic worms: Placed in bait traps, they enter roaches' breathing tubes and infect them with deadly bacteria. Harmless to humans. Not yet available.