It’s such a nice change having landlords that really care about their property and their tenants. That thought recurred to me this week when mine called and said an exterminator would be visiting the next day.

That may not sound like much of an endorsement, but it is. It seems my neighbors had noticed a few bugs, though I haven’t seen any myself; and my landlords said they were having the whole building sprayed to make sure they didn’t just skitter from one apartment to the next.

The type of bug was unspecified, but cockroaches are a fairly safe bet. And if a place is hospitable for another, less offensive insect, then roaches are likely to follow soon.

I know that can easily happen, and I’m grateful my building’s owners cared enough to do it right. The owners of other places I’ve lived – and I count a dozen apartments I’ve occupied in Bowling Green over the years, plus dorm rooms – usually didn’t, and if cockroaches have religion, they must worship some of my former landlords as gods.

When a friend and I lived on Kentucky Street, we shared an apartment wall with a batty old woman who liked to steal neighbors’ trash bags and stash them in her apartment – by the dozen. Naturally, her side of the wall was overrun with roaches, and we complained when they started wandering over to our side. The landlord cleared out the trash bags and had her apartment debugged – but only her apartment, so all the roaches moved to our side for the duration, no matter how much we sprayed, sealed and swatted.

Anyplace can suddenly become a roach motel; it’s no slur on landlords or tenants for a problem to develop. The test is how they deal with it. It’s not easy to handle; though cockroaches provoke well-earned disgust, they are amazing creatures.

Fossils of modern-looking roaches date back at least 140 million years, and they survived the dinosaurs to cozy up to the first proto-human crumb-droppers, finding their promised land when we started building houses and saving food for later.

Though other creatures, including humans, evolved all around them, cockroaches weren’t under any pressure to change. Random mutations didn’t take hold because they just weren’t needed – there’s always been a broad range of habitats hospitable to roaches, so they lacked the environmental pressure necessary for natural selection to promote adaptation. Roaches settled early on a good, basic design and stuck with it. They’re simple, durable and mass-produced, much like Volkswagen Beetles.

There are about 4,000 species of cockroach, but most of them live in jungles, and only four are common household pests. That’s enough. Roaches can live a month without food or water, and survive conditions that would kill humans. They’ll eat almost anything, living off paste and water condensation; now biologists think termites are an offshoot of cockroaches – lacking paste, they’ll even eat your house.

They’re also among the fastest animals on their feet, in relative terms; measuring speed by comparative body length, a human would have to run nearly 300 mph to match a roach scooting under your stove.

Some bugs are kept under control by other bugs that are more acceptable to humans. Not roaches – their main insect predators are wasps and house centipedes, neither of which is really a better roommate than a cockroach.

But wasps and centipedes may be preferable just because they’d be fewer in number. Roaches live anywhere from a few months to a couple of years; a female cockroach can have several hundred offspring in that brief time. And while mom’s still squeezing out egg cases, her great-grandkids can be having hundreds more.

Older, run-down houses are more susceptible to infestation, especially apartments. Given our high percentage of rentals, the older parts of Bowling Green are cockroach heaven.

How many are we talking? Well, in 1986, a USDA study found that the average low-income apartment in the American Southeast – that’s us – had 26,000 cockroaches.

I believe it. I’ve been in apartments, many near campus along Kentucky or Adams streets, where roaches wandered freely in full light. In others, where I’ve lived myself, so many would swarm out at night that it became a game to make a primitive flamethrower of a cigarette lighter and can of Lysol, turn off the lights for five minutes, then flick them back on and rush to torch the dozens of roaches that covered the walls.

Just how hard it can be to eliminate roaches can be seen from internal Amtrak memos for the past several years, now posted at www.thesmokinggun.com. Roach infestations in train cars are common, and considered emergencies, provoking the immediate use of three treatments with up to five different poisons.

And still the roaches go on, though their drive for household domination may be driven by simpler motives than their fiendish success would indicate. It doesn’t take much of a brain to be a good cockroach.

Most attempts to produce artificial intelligence have been “top-down,” trying to develop sophisticated rules of thought that massive computers could use to mimic human intelligence convincingly. But a few researchers took a contrarian, “bottom-up” approach, trying to assemble increasingly smart behavior from the interplay of basic and simple rules. One of these was Rodney Brooks of MIT, who sought to build intelligence bit by bit. And what was his model for simplicity generating fairly sophisticated behavior? The cockroach.

He built little buglike machines to work like actual bugs: Prefer cover. Hunt for “food.” Stay out of the light, and a few more. Brooks made some convincing roaches, and though they’re far from human intelligence, they have spawned successful offspring. Using the same principles, Brooks co-founded the company that makes Roomba, the robot vacuum cleaner. Like a super-roach, it sweeps floors clean by following a few basic rules to deal with new situations, adjusting its behavior with new information.

Perhaps the best description of man vs. roach comes from “The Strawberry Statement: Notes of a College Revolutionary,” James Simon Kunen’s 1968 book about campus upheavals against the Vietnam War. Kunen, then a 19-year-old student at Columbia University in New York City, lived in an apartment that could have been planted next to Western Kentucky University, and saw his domestic struggle as a microcosm of the international affairs that preoccupied the country.

“Actually, the parallels between my roaches and the Viet Cong can hardly be ignored,” Kunen wrote. “There are 17 parallels. Both my roaches and the V.C. are indigenous forces, are ignorant, ill-clad and underfed; they both drag away the bodies of their slain, come back no matter how many are killed, move by night, avoid prolonged engagements with the enemy, are not white, are fighting against people who are, have been fighting for generations, are of uncertain numbers, move via infiltration routes, are wily, are out-armed by the enemy, are contemptuous of death, are independent of outside control, are inscrutable and are winning.”

— Jim Gaines is a reporter for the Daily News. He can be reached at 783-3242 or via e-mail at jgaines@bgdailynews.com.