Stephen M. Casper â21 smiles for a Zoom screenshot while Trevor, his Madagascar hissing cockroach, crawls across his left cheek. Despite the species name, Trevor stays quiet â heâs pretty docile in the wintertime, explains Casper, who has kept pet cockroaches in his dorm room since he was a freshman.
Over the summer in 2018, Casper was working on a bioinformatics project under the Church Lab and living in Winthrop House when two of his cockroaches mated. Overwhelmed with 30 newborn cockroaches, Casper wanted to do some âcircle of life stuffâ and feed them to a lizard, so he took to the Pforzheimer House mailing list and asked if anyone could temporarily loan him a lizard. âBut I think I typed that email in a pretty ambiguous way because people started asking me if I found the lizard,â Casper recalls. âSomeone in my hall was like, âYou better find that lizard. I really hate lizards,â and I was like, âNo, I just need a lizard.â