There are articles circulating on the internet that establish similarities between cockroaches and shrimp, but are these creatures really similar?
Are cockroaches and shrimp really the same?
In reality they are not related, despite the desire to establish similarities in their feeding habits, the reality is that cockroaches bear no resemblance to shrimp.
On the one hand, shrimps are carydeans and are an infraorder of crustaceans (like crabs or lobsters) decapods (i.e., they have 10 legs). While cockroaches are blatodeans (an order of insects) hemimetabolous (they hatch from eggs, become nymphs and then adults) paurometabolous (from small they have adult appearance and gradually develop).
While crustaceans include crabs and lobsters, blatodeans include termites. Thus, cockroaches are more closely related to termites and shrimps to lobsters and prawns.
Both shrimp and cockroaches are arthropods, i.e., invertebrate animals with an external skeleton and jointed appendages.
But this is not reason enough to say that they look alike, since arthropods are the most numerous and diverse phylum of the animal kingdom (most animals are arthropods).
That is, a huge number of living things are arthropods, such as insects (butterflies, mosquitoes, dragonflies, grasshoppers, cicadas, beetles, ladybugs, bees, wasps or ants), arachnids (spiders, mites or scorpions), crustaceans (crabs, shrimps, lobsters or barnacles) and myriapods (such as centipedes or millipedes).
In fact, there are more than 1,200,000 different species of arthropods. This represents 80% of all known animal species.
