The American cockroach is the largest common house cockroach, about the length of a AA battery. Also called the water bug, it can live for a week without its head. It eats just about anything, including feces, the glue on book bindings, and other cockroaches, dead or alive. It can fly short distances and run as fast as the human equivalent of 210 miles per hour, relative to its size.

All these feats and more are encoded in the American cockroach’s genome, its complete set of genetic instructions, which was sequenced by Chinese scientists and published on Tuesday in Nature Communications. It is the second largest insect genome ever sequenced (the first belonging to a species of locust), and larger even than the human genome.

In China, the cockroach is often called “xiao qiang,” meaning “little mighty,” said Sheng Li, an entomology professor at South China Normal University in Guangzhou and lead author of the paper. “It’s a tiny pest, but has very strong vitality.”

His team found that groups of genes associated with sensory perception, detoxification, the immune system, growth and reproduction were all enlarged in the American cockroach, likely underpinning its scrappiness and ability to adapt to human environments.