Chemical communication is widely used for inter- and intra-specific recognition, and is especially prominent in nocturnal insects such as cockroaches. Females of the German cockroach, an economically and clinically important pest species, use a volatile pheromone to attract conspecific males over long distances, and a contact pheromone for close-range sexual recognition. The female contact pheromone, responsible for eliciting courtship behavior in males, is a blend of four hydrocarbon derivatives that are independently active. Interestingly, contact with the antennae of five cockroach species, out of 19 species tested, elicits courtship behavior in German cockroach males. Chemical fractionation techniques and behavioral assays to test the activity of the fractions were used to compare the chemicals of these species to the contact pheromone components of German cockroach females, and ultimately to identify the active compounds. Preliminary results show that the five species possess compounds that chromatographically co-elute with one of the components of the German cockroach contact pheromone. The different species do not inhabit the same ecological niches as the German cockroach, suggesting that (a) these species have independently converged on similar pheromones, or (b) that an ancestral pheromone was conserved in allopatric species. Hence, identifying the chemicals underlying this phenomenon could shed light on the evolution of sexual communication systems and speciation of these taxa.