The bug was about an inch long, with 12 uniform legs on both sides. The legs were coloured orange with black stripes, much like a spider. They went up to a joint, and back down to the ground. It had two, maybe three feelers at it's backside, which raised up when it was alerted. The front side had at least two feelers, maybe more. The didn't seem as big as the back ones. The body of the bug was orange-coloured, about an inch long, and didn't seem to have sections, though I didn't get a good look. It resembled a silverfish, but obviously wasn't, due to the uniform legs, while a silverfish has three accentuated legs. The bug also ran -very- quickly, about as fast as a small silver-coloured silverfish.
I guess it has been identified as a centipede, which together with millipedes and a few odds and ends makes up the arthropod
subphylum Myriapoda. They don't have a standard number of legs and range from fewer than ten to more than seven hundred.
Without a picture I was going to suggest that it might be an
isopod, an order of
crustaceans, which are also a subphylum of arthropods. All isopods have 14 legs. Most crustaceans are aquatic (and many are delicious: lobsters, shrimp, crabs, etc.
), but the isopods, which include woodlice and pillbugs or "roly-poly bugs," are a wildly successful clade of terrestrial crustaceans, encompassing more than ten thousand species.
If this really was a cockroach, I would strongly recommend calling an exterminator. Cockroaches are disease carrying and filthy, and if two are in the house, it is very likely there are more.
Actually, cockroaches are fastidious creatures who spend more time cleaning themselves than cats. If you have cockroaches it's because they found food lying around, so you or someone in your neighborhood is the slob!
Cockroaches are hardy, able to survive a long time without food and even capable of enduring freezing temperatures. They may be somewhat more intelligent than the average insect, but their real advantage is the use of chemicals to communicate, coordinating swarm behavior that can be quite a challenge to deal with.
Virtually all common insecticides are lethal to cockroaches, and since they are likely coming from somewhere else rather than breeding in your house, an expensive one-time extermination may not be the proper response, unless you can get everyone on your block to participate in the fumigation.
What you have to do is
find the slob in your neighborhood whose housekeeping is so poor that it attracts cockroaches. Once you fumigate or exterminate
him , then if you are just diligent about not leaving food lying around (including dishes of soft pet food, "cockroach heaven") and keeping your trash sealed, they'll go find another house with more for them to eat. Then use malathion or any common bug spray to kill off the stragglers.
If you want you can lay out boric acid trails. This kills them by dehydration rather than biochemistry, so they can't evolve an immunity to it. It's harmless to mammals and birds, it is lethal to virtually all insects and other arthropods, and it doesn't smell.
