Headless roaches are capable of living for weeks. There are couple factors make cockroaches survive without head.
- Cockroaches do not have blood pressure the way people do. They don’t have a huge network of blood vessels like that of humans, or tiny capillaries that you need a lot of pressure to flow blood through. They have an open circulatory system, which there’s much less pressure in.
- The hardy vermin breathe through spiracles, or little holes in each body segment. Plus, the roach brain does not control this breathing and blood does not carry oxygen throughout the body. Rather, the spiracles pipe air directly to tissues through a set of tubes called tracheae.
- Cockroaches are also poikilotherms, or cold-blooded, meaning they need much less food than humans do.
- Insects have clumps of ganglia (nerve tissue agglomerations) distributed within each body segment capable of performing the basic nervous functions responsible for reflexes, so without the brain, the body can still function in terms of very simple reactions.