Cockroaches can live without their heads for weeks

A cockroach can live for weeks without its head

It’s sounds really amazing; being able to live on for weeks once decapitated. Most often people tell that a cockroach is able to do this. And it’s true;
A cockroach can live on headless for weeks.

But it’s not so special as it seems; many other insects can do exactly the same thing!

How a cockroach survives decapitation

The problem with literally ‘loosing your head’ for a human is the fact that you will lose a lot of blood resulting in to low blood pressure, as well as the fact that we breath through our mouths, so without a head our body won’t get any oxygen.
But cockroaches don’t have blood pressure like we do, and therefor the neck will just seal off by clotting when you cut of the head of a cockroach.
What about oxygen? Well, the cockroach doesn’t breath through it’s mouth, but through so called ‘spiracles’; little holes in each body segment. What’s even more important is the fact that the cockroach brain does not control the breathing and the cockroach doesn’t need blood to transport the oxygen within the body. Instead the spiracles pie air directly to tissues through the tracheae, a ‘set of tubes’.
Since many insects resemble cockroaches in this way, this is also true for them and they can survive without a head for weeks.

Source: Scientific American

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