Introducing Kyle Kandilian, the the Michigan-Dearborn University student that lives with about 200,000 cockroaches.

According to Detroit Free Press, Kandilian has this hobby for two reasons. One is for fun and the other is to help him pay for his education. The 20-year-old has a room that’s stacked up with 130 varieties of roach that can be purchased for “a dime a dozen” to around R1,970 for special breeds, namely “Macropanesthia rhinoceros’.”

Here is an extract from an interview with the collector.

So, roaches as pets! How’d you come up with that?

Well, it started with the hissing cockroaches, which kind of have always been the pet roach that people have gone to when you want an interesting insect or a bizarre, sort of wonky pet. Ever since maybe, like, the 1990’s, the Madagascar hissing cockroach — Gromphadorhina portentosa — has been sort of like the standard cockroach pet. It’s maybe only been within the last 15 years that people have started looking into other species as pets. … They’re fun to maintain and to look at, so a similar thing I guess to people who would keep different varieties of hostas or something like that. Kind of like an indoor garden except that instead of plants, it’s cockroaches. (Laughs.)

Your mom is a very tolerant woman. Your dad is tolerant, too.

That’s a very good word to use. Tolerant. For both of them. They’re very tolerant of my enthusiasm.

So who’s buying these things?

I have a wide variety of customers. People with reptiles, of course, or amphibians, looking to feed their animals. Universities purchase from me a lot during the school year.

At what point did you become proud of your hobby and willing to talk about it publicly? Because the stigma is, it’s a little weird, right?

I guess I’ve always been kind of weird. (Chuckles.) And people kind of associate me with that. So I’ve always been pretty happy and enthusiastic to talk to people about the roaches and about what I do. … I’ve always liked to try to dissociate that stigma as best I can. And I’ve realized that being an introvert about that isn’t the best way to go about it.

For the rest of the interview, click here or visit his website, here.

[Source: Design Taxi]