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Microbes play a huge role in our nutrition, our immunity¹, maybe even our mental health. But we aren’t the only ones that rely on these armies of resident bacteria. "Baby cockroaches², the ones that just emerge from the egg, don't have any gut³ bacteria." Coby Schal, an entomologist and chemical ecologist at North Carolina State University. "The first thing they do is take a nice feces meal: basically, eating the poop of their brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers."

微生物在我们的营养、免疫甚至心理健康中都发挥着重要的作用。但是并只是我们人类依赖这些常住细菌。“那些刚才出壳的幼儿蟑螂，肠道内并没有细菌。”科比·沙尔是北卡罗莱纳州立大学的一名昆虫学者和化学生态学家。他讲到，“这些刚出生的蟑螂所作的第一件事情就是享受一场粪便盛宴，基本上就是吃他们兄弟姐妹和父母的粪便。”

Excrement⁴ inoculates⁵ the roaches with beneficial gut bugs⁶, Schal says. And it's also a longevity-boosting nutritional⁷ supplement. But the weirdest⁸ thing is, the poop actually calls the tots to come hither. Because it's laced with compounds, like fatty acids, that attract roaches of all ages. The substances are called aggregation⁹ pheromones. So poop essentially¹⁰ serves as a rallying call to congregate—and feast.

沙尔称，粪便孕育蟑螂拥有有益的肠道细菌。同时粪便还为蟑螂提供长期的营养供给。但是最奇怪的事情是，这些粪便会招引一些幼儿的蟑螂。因为这些粪便中含有脂肪酸等有机化合物，会吸引各个年龄阶段的蟑螂。这些物质被称为聚合信息素。所以粪便实际上是蟑螂们聚集——享受盛宴的集合信号。

To determine where the attractive chemicals come from, Schal and his colleagues raised a group of sterile¹¹, microbe-free cockroaches—and then collected their excrement.

为了确定这些有吸引力的化学物质来自哪里，沙尔和同事们饲养了一群无菌的、无微生物的蟑螂，并收集了他们的排泄物。

But as they suspected, the sterile stuff, without any microbial by-products, failed to tantalize¹² other roaches. They then gave the sterile bugs a fecal transplant. "So we took feces of normal cockroaches, and exposed sterile cockroaches to those feces. They very readily eat these feces and they incorporate the microbes, the bacteria from these feces, into their gut. And then these cockroaches then produce the aggregation pheromone again." They published the findings in the Proceedings¹³ of the National Academy of Sciences.

但是令他们怀疑的是，这些无菌、没有任何微生物副产品的粪便并没有吸引其他的蟑螂。之后，研究人员给这些无菌的虫子进行粪便移植。“我们收集正常蟑螂的粪便，然后将无菌的蟑螂来接触这些粪便。这些无菌的蟑螂非常乐意享受这些粪便，然后它们就会吸收这些粪便中的微生物和细菌。之后这些蟑螂就会产生聚合信息素。”研究人员将研究结果发表在《美国国家科学院院刊》上。

The results suggest gut bacteria may do a lot more than we thought—including, at least for cockroaches, aid communication. That's a plus for us—because we might be able to hijack¹⁴ those compounds to build better baits and traps. To make sure that [Clip from commercial: "Roaches check in… but they don't check out."]

研究结果表明肠道细菌的功能可能比我们想象的要多——其中对于蟑螂来说，包括辅助交流。这对我们来说有帮助的——因为我们或许可以劫持这些化合物来构建更好的诱饵和陷阱。保证蟑螂们“有进无出” 。