There Is Now a Cockroach Named Tom Brady at the Atlanta Zoo
Stop by the Atlanta Zoo sometime soon and you’ll get your chance to meet Tom Brady—the cockroach.
After the Patriots beat the Atlanta Falcons in the Super Bowl, zookeepers had to hold up their end of a bet with the Roger Williams Park Zoo in Providence. The bet: the losing side had to name a baby animal after the star quarterback of the winning team.
“[F]iguring the losing side would be pretty bitter about it, we came to the agreement that baby animal … would be a Madagascar hissing cockroach,” the Atlanta Zoo wrote on Facebook.
A zookeeper introduced a family of the bugs in a video it posted yesterday, introducing the bulbous Gromphadorhina portentosa specimens one by one while dropping them into a terrarium. The cockroaches, she said, were named after the family members of the fictional Brady Bunch: Mike, Carol, Greg, Peter, Bobby, Marsha, Jan, and Cody.
All except for one: the “littlest baby of them all,” she said, holding a tiny, dark-colored roach in her hand. “I’d like to introduce Tom Brady.”
Tom Brady the cockroach makes that hissing sound by blowing air through breathing holes in his body, according to National Geographic. He hides “amidst leaf litter, logs, and other detritus,” and when fully grown, he will have large horns.
Tom Brady the quarterback has five Super Bowl rings.