Are Madagascar Hissing Cockroaches Good Pets? An Honest UK Guide

Quick answer: Madagascar hissing cockroaches do not bite, they cannot fly, and an escapee cannot establish itself in a British house. They handle well, they live two to five years, and they need a heat mat all year in a UK home rather than only in winter. The one thing worth reading before you buy is the allergy section below, because cockroach proteins are a documented allergen and most care sheets skip it.

This is the animal people ask me the most nervous questions about, and almost none of them are about husbandry. They are about whether it is safe, whether it is odd to want one, and whether it will end up behind the fridge. So this guide answers those first.

Do they bite?

No. There is no documented case of a Madagascar hissing cockroach biting a person. Oklahoma State University Extension states flatly that they will not bite, and Carolina Biological, a separate US supply house, puts it as mouthparts that chew but are not strong enough to chew a finger. They are detritivores. Their jaws are made for soft decaying matter, not for skin.

What people occasionally mistake for a bite is their feet. Each foot carries friction pads, one sticky adhesive pad and two small claws, the machinery that takes them up a pane of glass. On skin that reads as a distinct pulling, clinging sensation. One source notes the leg spines can scratch hard enough to draw blood, though that is a single mention and has never happened to me. The practical point is that if a hisser has hold of you, do not snatch your hand away. Let it release. You are far more likely to injure the animal than it is to injure you.

What handling one is actually like

Slow, heavy and calm. They walk rather than dart, they are large enough to feel substantial in a palm, and they will usually hiss the first few times you pick them up. That startle hiss fades with repeated handling, which is the closest thing to taming this animal offers.

The risk in handling runs the other way. Adults cannot regenerate a lost leg, males in a colony routinely lose bits of foot to fighting, and a fall of a few feet can kill one. Handle low, over a table or a lap. Leave freshly moulted animals alone entirely, because they come out soft and white and stay vulnerable for several hours.

Allergies, and why I am raising them

Cockroach allergen is one of the better-evidenced indoor asthma triggers in the medical literature. Whether that carries across to this species is a fair question, and the honest answer is that it has barely been looked at.

What exists is one study. In 2007, in Annals of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology, eight of fifteen patients already sensitised to German cockroaches were found to have antibodies that bound to Madagascar hissing cockroach proteins, and the authors recommended caution where these animals are used in schools and museums. Small sample, laboratory binding rather than a clinical challenge, and no allergy case in a hisser keeper has ever been published. So do not read it as a warning that you will react, but as a reason not to assume a pet species differs from a pest one at the protein level.

Separately, a 2008 paper in Mycoses sampled hissers from homes, zoos, pet shops and classrooms and found moulds on the animals themselves as well as in their droppings and shed skins, with Aspergillus niger concentrated in the waste. That is also a single unrepeated study, but the advice it leads to is easy. One of its authors put it well: this is not a pet you can ignore, because without regular cleaning the droppings and old skins build up.

Cockroach allergen rides on large particles, so it settles rather than hanging in the air and gets stirred up when disturbed. That work was done on pest species, not this one, but it points at cleaning day as the moment that matters. For most people none of this is a reason to avoid the animal. It is a reason to wash your hands after handling and after cleaning, to clear out shed skins and droppings rather than let them accumulate, and to think harder before buying if you or a child in the house is asthmatic or already cockroach-allergic.

Could one escape and infest the house?

No, and the reason is worth understanding rather than trusting.

They are wingless at every stage of life and cannot fly. To breed they need sustained warmth and a supply of decaying plant matter, and the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station describes the species as poorly adapted to man-made environments. Carolina states plainly that they will not infest a house should they escape. The strongest evidence is the absence of any: kept in huge numbers worldwide for decades, in classrooms and living rooms, this cockroach has never established a wild population outside Madagascar. An escapee in a British room is a cockroach with a survival problem, not the start of a colony.

They are legal to keep here. They appear on no schedule of the Dangerous Wild Animals Act 1976, nowhere in Schedule 9 of the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, and not on the GB or EU lists of invasive alien species, where the only insect named is the Asian hornet. But section 14 of that 1981 Act makes it an offence to release or allow to escape any animal not ordinarily resident in Great Britain. That wording is worth reading twice, because letting one out is itself the offence. The Act provides a defence if you took all reasonable steps, which in practice means a lid you can point to. Since they climb glass without effort, that lid is the whole game. A band of petroleum jelly round the inside of the top few centimetres stops them getting purchase, and wants redoing once it picks up substrate.

Do they smell?

Nobody has measured this, so I will not promise you an odourless animal. What experienced keepers report is a faint musty or vinegary note, said to be stronger from males, and said to be present even in a clean enclosure. Mine have never bothered anyone in the room.

A hisser enclosure with a real smell is usually reporting a husbandry problem: uneaten fruit has soured, droppings and shed skins have built up, or the substrate has gone from damp to wet.

The hiss, and what it is for

Most insects that make noise do it mechanically, by scraping, clicking or buckling part of the body. This one forces air out through a specialised pair of abdominal breathing pores, behind which the airway is greatly elongated into a conical bore. Nelson worked that out in 1979. How exactly the shape turns airflow into sound has still not been pinned down.

It is not unique, though, and you will see that claim repeated everywhere. Sound production by moving air has been reported in several insects, and the death's-head hawkmoth is the other case that has been experimentally confirmed. Rare, not one of a kind.

What the hiss is for is more interesting. Follow-up work found males hiss during fights, during courtship and during mating, while both sexes hiss when startled. Males whose hissing spiracles were blocked failed to mate at all, and playing recorded courtship hisses back to females restored normal mating. How much a male hisses in a fight tracks how aggressive he is. The noise is not incidental, it is how the animal negotiates.

What they actually need

Warmth is the one thing a UK keeper must plan for. An ordinary room here sits below what this species wants, so a heat mat on a thermostat, fixed against one wall, is standard equipment rather than a winter measure. Give them a warm end in the high twenties and let the far end run cooler.

Beyond that they are undemanding. A secure plastic or glass box, a few centimetres of moisture-holding substrate, then as much cork bark, hollow log and stacked egg crate as will fit on top, because what they want is to be underneath something. Keep one end damp. Water goes in a shallow dish packed with cotton wool so nymphs cannot drown. Feed fruit and vegetables with a little protein occasionally, and lift out anything uneaten before it sours. Substrate and botanicals are in our accessories range.

They breed readily once warm. Females carry the egg case internally and give birth to live young, tens at a time. Reports of how long they take to mature run from five months to a year, so treat any single figure with suspicion. One more honest note: the pet trade's hissing cockroaches have never been sorted out genetically, several near-identical species circulate under one name, and that is why our listing says Gromphadorhina sp. and stops there.

Frequently asked questions

Are Madagascar hissing cockroaches legal to keep in the UK?

Yes. They are not controlled or restricted under UK law. Releasing one, or allowing one to escape, is an offence under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, so a secure enclosure is the obligation that applies to you in practice.

Can you buy live cockroaches in the UK?

Yes, from specialist invertebrate keepers rather than pet shops. Everything in our cockroach range is captive-bred, so the animals are already acclimated to UK conditions and to the diet we recommend.

How long does a pet cockroach live?

Two to five years for this species, which is long for an insect and longer than most people expect. No reliable difference between males and females has been established.

Can hissing cockroaches be tamed?

Not tamed, but they habituate. A hisser handled regularly stops hissing at you, which in practice looks a lot like tameness.

Do they need a heat mat?

In a UK home, yes, and all year rather than seasonally. This is a tropical species and an ordinary British room sits below what it wants. Use a thermostat and heat one side only.

Are they a good first invertebrate?

They are among the easiest. Large enough to watch without a lens, slow enough to handle, forgiving of enclosure mistakes though not of being dropped, and they hiss when you pick them up. Our beginner cockroach guide compares them with the alternatives.

If you were on the fence

If the safety questions were what held you back, they are answered above, and the answers are boring, which is the point. Our hissers are UK captive-bred. For something smaller and brighter there is the metallic Emerald, the Simandoa Cave Roach, believed extinct in the wild and surviving in captivity, and the Cuban, which is pale green and does fly.