Bonus Episode: COCKROACH MILK with Joshua Benoit and Sinead English

Summary

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Ologies with Alie Ward

Bonus Episode: COCKROACH MILK with Joshua Benoit and Sinead English
Released: October 20, 2025

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Overview

This bonus episode plunges into the world of cockroach milk—a bizarre and fascinating secretion produced by the Pacific beetle mimic cockroach, Diploptera punctata. Host Alie Ward invites entomologists Dr. Joshua Benoit (University of Cincinnati) and Dr. Sinead English (University of Bristol) to unpack the science of insect lactation, the evolutionary context of live birth in insects, and the tantalizing (and slightly comical) prospects of cockroach milk as a human food. True to Ologies’ form, the conversation is a delightful cocktail of hard science, weird trivia, personal anecdotes, and infectious curiosity—answering all the questions you never knew you had about milky bugs.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Setting the Stage: Why Cockroach Milk? [00:59]

• Alie recounts her near-miss with tasting cockroach milk on The Tonight Show, after months of laboriously sourcing samples, only to be thwarted at the last minute by "Safety Steve."
• Her obsession with cockroach milk started with a 2017 NPR article hailing it as "the most nutritious substance on earth."
• She describes the Diploptera punctata cockroach as a "beetle mimic" found in tropical locales.

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2. What is "Bug Pregnancy?" [06:14]

• Gravid vs. Pregnant:
  • (Josh Benoit, 06:24):

    “They can be gravid... usually like carrying eggs... what we kind of call actual pregnancy is when they have this post-egg stage that they hold within their body.”

  • Tsetse flies and Diploptera punctata roaches both carry live young inside, with a brood sac that functions somewhat like a placenta.
• Viviparity in Insects:
  • Live birth has evolved more times in insects than in vertebrates:
    (Josh Benoit, 08:22):

    “[Live birth has] actually evolved independently more times... maybe five or six times more in insects [than vertebrates].”

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3. The Pacific Beetle Cockroach: Unique Biology [07:25]

• Species Spotlight:
  • Diploptera punctata is the only truly viviparous (live-bearing) cockroach species.
  • Sinead notes:

    “They don't look like [house] cockroaches... they're quite pretty… the only truly viviparous cockroaches.”

• Why Live Birth?
  • Predation avoidance and resource uncertainty theorized as evolutionary pressures:
    (Sinead English, 09:05):

    “Keeping them inside until they're a bit more developed and then they come out a little bit less vulnerable... helps increase the general evolutionary success.” (Josh Benoit, 10:01):
    “If you give birth to a little baby and they can't get food right away, they're probably going to die…”

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4. Anatomy of Insect "Lactation" [11:05]

• Synchronization: Insects like tsetse flies and Pacific beetle cockroaches "nurse" their young while still pregnant—different from the mammalian pattern.
• Brood Sac: Small number of embryos (8-18 max) develop inside a brood sac (pseudo-placenta).
• Gestation Duration:
  • Cockroach: 70–90 days
  • Tsetse fly: ~9–10 days
• Birth Process:
  • Babies are born small and "inflate" after emerging, compared to a “clown car” (Benoit, 13:39).

    “The reason there's not the space is as they're emerging, they're actually inflating with air at that point…”

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5. Cockroach Milk: From Production to Function [12:03]

• How is Milk Delivered & Consumed?

  • Embryos develop in a thick, "toothpaste or tapioca pudding"-like bath:
    (Josh Benoit, 12:21):

    “It's kind of like they're in a bath of toothpaste. It's pretty thick... they end up eating that... then they can pretty much darken and go and they're in a much better place.”

• Nutrition from Nothing:

  • Cockroaches produce highly nutritious “milk” from generalist diets (dog food, etc). (Sinead English, 15:05):

    “They manage to make quite a lot from not very much.”

• Molecular Makeup:

  • High in proteins (lipocalins), lipids, little sugar.
    (Josh Benoit, 15:43):

    “It's just milk... a class of lipocalins... small proteins... usually something like fat-soluble vitamins... really similar to milk.”

  • Contains beneficial microbiota, mirroring some aspects of mammalian milk
    (Sinead English, 16:44):

    “They also have beneficial microbes which are transferred in the milk…”

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6. Could Cockroach Milk Be the Next Superfood? [23:51]

• Nutritional Hype vs. Practicality:
  • Despite being dubbed more nutritious than buffalo milk, scaling production for human consumption is essentially impossible at present. (Josh Benoit, 24:16):

    “Taking it to where we're having cockroach milk lattes... probably we would get it more from someone grinding up the cockroaches... rather than an actual milk product.”

  • Conversation about entomophagy and safety for people with shellfish allergies.

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7. Milking a Cockroach: Not Like a Cow! [25:48]

• No Nipples Involved:
  • Extraction involves removing embryos and/or using absorbent material in the brood sac—no mammalian-like milking. (Josh Benoit, 25:58):

    “No, it does not [have nipples]… you can obtain [milk] by either removing it from the guts of the developing embryos... or put an absorbent material into the brood sac...”

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8. What is Cockroach Milk Like? [27:48]

• Consistency:

  • When collected and diluted, resembles “1% milk” (Josh Benoit, 28:23).

• Taste:

  • No scientist present has tasted it.
    (Josh Benoit, 28:52):

    "I've never tasted it." Humorous family dynamics:
    “I'm pretty sure if I ever actually did try it...[my wife] would probably not allow me to come home after admitting it for a few days.”

  • Sinead is “quite intrigued to taste it” and would consider trying it if her lab produced a sample.

• Alie’s Quest:

  • Alie describes her arduous journey to obtain just a few milliliters, which are now stored at the American Museum of Natural History.

    "If you work there, don't drink my cockroach milk in the office fridge.” [27:39]

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9. Science and Collaboration [31:42]

• Continued Work:
  • Josh expects to continue collaborating with Sinead for “the next 15, 20 years… there’s so much more to do.”
  • Sinead:

    “Insects are such an unknown frontier for some of these questions.” [31:52]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Alie on insect weirdness:

  “So, yeah, this single cockroach species that makes milk, Diploptera punctata, is a beetle mimic. And the... they're these cute little dusty brown critters.” [07:44]

• Josh’s “clown car” analogy:

  “Their birth process effectively reminds me of like... the clown car... you see the mom and like a couple [babies] come out, and then a couple more, and then a few more... as they're emerging, they're inflating with air at that point.” [13:39]

• On “milking” methods:

  “No, there's no actual nipples involved in the milk processes of cockroaches or tsetse flies.” —Josh Benoit [25:58]

• Alie’s plea:

  “If you work [at the Museum], don't drink my cockroach milk in the office fridge.” [27:39]

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Important Timestamps

• [00:59] Alie explains how her quest for cockroach milk began
• [05:02] Guest introductions: Sinead English and Josh Benoit
• [06:14–07:44] Pregnant bugs: gravid vs. pregnant, live birth evolution, Diploptera punctata as a unique cockroach
• [11:05–13:39] The brood sac & “clown car” birth analogy
• [15:05–16:44] Nutrition, diet, and milk composition
• [23:51–25:04] Future of cockroach milk as a commercial or food product
• [25:48–26:54] How cockroach milk is actually extracted
• [27:48–29:35] Describing the milk, taste tests, and humorous family asides
• [31:42–32:02] Ongoing collaboration and the “frontier” of insect science

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Tone & Language

The episode is conversational, clever, and full of irreverent enthusiasm. Alie’s humor (“If you’re feeling entrepreneurial... Brood Sack Diaper Bags!”) keeps the weirdness approachable. The scientists join in with vivid analogies (“clown car” birth) and self-deprecating honesty about not having tasted their own research prize.

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Conclusion

This bonus episode is a quirky deep-dive into one of the insect world’s most bizarre secrets. You'll learn surprising facts about insect reproduction, the molecular composition of cockroach milk, evolutionary parallels to mammals, and why you (probably) won't be pouring it into your coffee anytime soon. More than anything, it’s a celebration of the strangeness and charm of scientific curiosity—proving, once again, that everything in the whole wide world is riveting.

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For more on these scientists' work and to see Alie's Tonight Show segment, check the show notes or visit alieward.com/ologies/roachmilk

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Transcript

[Allie Ward]

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[Josh Benoit]

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[Allie Ward]

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[Josh Benoit]

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[Allie Ward]

Lowe's we help you save. Oh, hey, it's the convo you're overhearing at a cafe. And this is Ologies. I'm Alie Ward. I'm so proud of you. Here you are. Maybe after this week's main episode to hear a bonus episode about cockroach milk, about which I'm actually very passionate. So let me set the stage. So for a few years, the Tonight show was asking if I'd want to do a bug segment for them, and I kept chickening out. And then in May of this year, I went on the show. I showed Salma Hayek some beetle larva and scorpions and this bird eating tarantula. I put a cat I'm praying mantis on Jimmy Fallon's face.

[Josh Benoit]

I'm not looking.

[Allie Ward]

No, There you go.

[Josh Benoit]

She wants to go to you.

[Allie Ward]

We can put one on here.

[Interviewer (possibly a co-host or guest host)]

She doesn't want to go.

[Josh Benoit]

You did just see being very confident about this.

[Allie Ward]

Oh, yeah. Look at you, Summer. I like her. Yeah. You made a new friend.

[Josh Benoit]

This is nice.

[Allie Ward]

We'll link the segment in the show notes. But what you did not see was me eating the milk of a cockroach. This is because of fate and sorrow, but it's also because of a guy on set known as Safety Steve. And last minute, my little vials of frozen cockroach milk were given like this tragic kibosh. After months and months of working with a lab to milk cockroaches, I am getting ahead of myself because. What do you mean cockroaches make milk? I'm sure you are wondering that we're going to dive into a vat of it in a minute. But first, thank you so much to patrons of the show who support for as little as a dollar a month. Thank you to everyone out there in ologies merch from ologiesmerch.com and thank you to everyone who leaves reviews for the show, which I earnestly read and they help us so much. And to prove it, I read one recent one like this one from Paragrindis, who left a review saying everything in the whole wide world is riveting, soul saving for our times. Thank you, Peregrindice. I don't know how to say your name, but I like your review also. Hey Fiona. So let's get into this episode. So in 2017, I saw an article about cockroach milk in the news. It was all over the news. One NPR piece proclaimed it the most nutritious substance on earth, three times that of buffalo milk. And I have thought about this substance like roughly daily ever since. And I have told anyone who will listen about it now, including you. And so when it came time to trying to line up some bug facts for the Tonight Show, I tracked down this one researcher, Dr. Emily Jennings, asking about obtaining some of this substance for, like, the TV taste test. As it turns out, Dr. Jennings no longer worked in the cockroach milk industry, but was familiar with the podcast and wrote me back. Hi Ally, I'm hoping this is real and not a scam. Who is out there scamming people for cockroach milk though? Haha. So Dr. Jennings put me in touch with two research colleagues whom you are about to meet. Now, one pioneer of the research you won't meet was Dr. Barbara Stray of the University of Iowa. And she unfortunately passed into the next realm last year at the age of 97. But her work continues at a few labs across the world, including at the University of Cincinnati and the University of Bristol. So we chatted with two researchers who work with this one species, Diploptera punctata, the Pacific beetle roach, which can be found, if you're looking for them, in the forests of Australia and Myanmar and India and Fiji, China, Hawaii. And this cockroach, it looks like a beetle. It loves vacation destinations and and it makes milk for its babies. So let's get into the hows and the whys and the what of insects that nurse their young, including tsetse flies and of course, our beloved milky mama roach, Diploptera punctata. So we're doing it. Okay. Come on. It's cool. You're gonna love this. There you.

[Sinead English]

Hi, I'm Sinead English and I'm a Future Leaders fellow and a associate professor at the University of Bristol in the uk.

[Josh Benoit]

Hi, I'm Josh Binoit, I'm a professor of biological sciences and I'm at the University of Cincinnati.

[Allie Ward]

So, quick background. Sinead, whose father worked for the un, grew up in Zimbabwe, where she said that the insects were top tier. 10 out of 10, she says, except for mosquitoes. And Josh grew up in Ohio with like a stream in the backyard, plenty of buggy critters, and thought maybe he'd go to med school, but was offered a spot in a research lab looking at cave crickets and skeeters and tsetse flies, which are vectors for this sub Saharan disease called sleeping sickness. Now, Sinead still works on tsetse flies, which also make milk and give birth to one huge baby. And they've been working together for about five years on the science of pregnant bugs. They recently co authored the paper Viviparity and Obligate Blood Feeding Tsetse Flies as a Unique Research System to study Climate change. So let's get on to business because before we chat about the cockroach milk, we gotta cover these expecting mamas who are bugs. Do bugs get pregnant? Are they, what do you call them? Expecting?

[Interviewer (possibly a co-host or guest host)]

I always hear with reptiles and insects, maybe gravid. And can you describe the difference between being pregnant and being gravid?

[Josh Benoit]

So mainly they can be gravid when people say that they're usually like carrying eggs and that sort of thing when they're actually usually pregnant. And what we kind of call actual pregnancy is when they kind of have this post egg stage that they hold within their body. So tsetse flies have a little tiny fly maggot that they have in the.

[Allie Ward]

Uterus, baby on board, that kind of thing.

[Josh Benoit]

The cockroaches have a whole bunch of very small embryo like baby cockroaches in a brood sac, which is like a pseudo placenta. So it's kind of like a placenta like system. And then there's a few other examples of it. Like earwigs have some examples and there's a few other within insects. But the really the two of the major models are the cockroach and the tsetse flies.

[Interviewer (possibly a co-host or guest host)]

And so this is not all cockroaches that give live birth and make milk inside a brood sac. Can you tell me a little bit about the specific study species?

[Sinead English]

So they're the Diploptera punctata and they're known as The Pacific beetle mimic cockroach. You know, they don't look like cockroaches that might scuttle across the floor. They're quite pretty. Like they have this beetle like carapace on their back. But they. Of all the cockroach species, they're the only ones which are pregnant. So they're only truly viviparous cockroaches.

[Allie Ward]

So, yeah, this single cockroach species that makes milk, Diploptera punctata, is a beetle mimic. And the. They're these cute little dusty brown critters. They look kind of like a June beetle. And as we covered last week with Dr. Dominic Evangelista in the Blattodiology episode, there are 7,000 identified species of cockroach, with a possible three times that total in the world. So there's a lot we don't know about the creatures of planet Earth, including cockroaches, but we do know of at least one species of cockroach making milk. But they're not the only insects that give live birth.

[Sinead English]

It's more common in flies compared to cockroaches.

[Josh Benoit]

The one big thing that it's worth mentioning is live birth has actually evolved more times in the insect systems than it actually has in the vertebrate systems.

[Interviewer (possibly a co-host or guest host)]

What?

[Josh Benoit]

So it's actually evolved independently more times, but people think of it as like this kind of vertebrate specific aspect, but it's actually probably happened, I would wait, say sinead, probably five or six times more in insects. And it may just be there's just more insect lineages for this to potentially happen.

[Interviewer (possibly a co-host or guest host)]

Any theories, any hypotheses on why Pacific beetle cockroaches might be giving live birth as opposed to all the other cockroaches doing it differently?

[Sinead English]

It could be that there might be particularly high predation against that early life stage and then kind of keeping them inside until they're a bit more developed and then they come out a little bit less vulnerable to those pred predators helps increase the general evolutionary success of that species.

[Allie Ward]

So in this environment, if you have 100 little less developed babies, they may get picked off too easily. They could go hungry. But if you invest heavily in a dozen or so keeping them inside your physical body and then shooting them into the world when they're more prepared, they may have a better shot at life. And if you are listening to this and you are 28 and you're living at home with your parents and you can use this argument to justify finishing off the coffee creamer without replacing it.

[Sinead English]

But it comes at a big cost because you can't do that for 100 nymphs. So then you have to kind of put a little bit more in, investing in fewer that come out even more protected.

[Josh Benoit]

Yeah. The only other one that I heard for this one besides that is that they probably evolved, and they seem to be distributed in among tropical and subtropical island areas where if you give birth to a little baby and they can't get food right away, they're probably going to die. Or if the mom who's built up a reserve can keep them going for a period of time, then they may do a little bit better. But it's probably one or the other or probably both.

[Sinead English]

I think that actually that resource uncertainty aspect is really interesting because that's one of the evolutionary reasons why they think lactation's evolved in mammals. And I think just to follow on, a really interesting aspect of that is this link between pregnancy and lactation and when they occur. So in a lot of the insects, they're producing this milk, but it's during pregnancy. So it's a bit different to the way we have it in mammals, where you have the nourishing that happens in utero, and then you have lactation afterwards.

[Interviewer (possibly a co-host or guest host)]

And so with this Pacific beetle cockroach, they do it at the same time they're pregnant while they're nursing.

[Josh Benoit]

Yeah.

[Interviewer (possibly a co-host or guest host)]

So let's get to the anatomy of this, because, Josh, when I got to talk to you about this before, blew my mind. But instead of having a ton of eggs and being like, see you, Good luck, I wish you the best. They keep a smaller number of eggs.

[Allie Ward]

In a brood sac inside their bodies, so feel free. Pregnant people who are listening to call your uterus a brood sack. Or maybe you're feeling entrepreneurial, perhaps. Think about launching a diaper bag brand called Brood Sack Cockroach Print. I'm out.

[Interviewer (possibly a co-host or guest host)]

How long are they pregnant for?

[Josh Benoit]

It's a long time. It's about 70 to 90 days. And that's when there's actually, like, embryos and eggs and kind of juveniles developing within the brood sac. And it can vary a little bit, and there's some pliability with it, but it's a long time. The tsetse flies, they're only about nine or 10 days.

[Allie Ward]

I'll get you out of here. Okay.

[Interviewer (possibly a co-host or guest host)]

Can you describe what is happening with the milk in the brood sack, with the lactation and pregnancy? Are they swimming in a goo? Is it just like a buffet of milk in there? How would you describe it?

[Josh Benoit]

It's kind of like they're in a bath of toothpaste. So for lack of a better term, it's pretty thick, it's pretty heavy when it's, it gets secreted outward around the brood sac and then the embryos will end up ingesting it and it actually turns into these kind of really nutritious crystals. So if you actually go and pull it out of and look in the guts of the developing larva, it's just really nutritious crystals and it's like highly caloric, complete diet, that sort of thing. But it would be like, I don't even want to say toothpaste. It'd be more like tapioca pudding that they're in and so they end up eating that in. Then it's just continually produced throughout the pregnancy cycle. It provides everything and they emerge and they can pretty much darken and go and they're in a much better place or about 10 times the size they normally would be if they just emerged from the egg.

[Interviewer (possibly a co-host or guest host)]

I mean, that's like an 80 pound child. It's like giving birth to an 80 pound child. You figure the average birth is what, like six or six to eight pounds?

[Sinead English]

Exactly.

[Interviewer (possibly a co-host or guest host)]

How many bab is she tapioca pudding at a time?

[Josh Benoit]

That ranges from eight. Sometimes it's even lower that to like, I think the most we ever saw in any of ours was 18. And that was a pretty extreme case. They're all deflated when they're in the brood sac. And so then as they emerge, they fill with air to kind of reach their full size. So their birth process effectively reminds me of like when you're at the circus and you see the clown culture car come out and you see like the 20 clowns exit the car. Because you'll see this mom and like a couple come out and then you watch and then a couple more come out and then a few more and then a few more. And it's just like there's not the space. But the reason there's not the space is as they're emerging, they're actually inflating with air at that point. And so they come out about two to three times bigger than they were within the actual brood sack. But it's, it's, it's like a clown car.

[Allie Ward]

Listen, it's Spooktober. And if you need to know why cockroaches and clowns shiver your timbers. Please enjoy our recent Saro psychology episode all about creepiness. And yes, we do discuss clowns in it. But back to less creepy subjects. Pregnant cockroaches.

[Interviewer (possibly a co-host or guest host)]

I mean, when you're pregnant with up to 18 babies. Are you eating for 18? How are you making this incredibly nutritionally dense substance for 18? Like what do you have to eat in order to make that?

[Sinead English]

I think that's a really amazing thing about cockroaches is that they manage to make quite a lot from not very much. So you know, they don't feed anything particularly nutritious that we're giving them. Like in my lab in Bristol we're just giving them bits of dog food and they don't even really gorge themselves, they're sort of grazing away at it. So it is interesting that they can produce that very rich milk from a very generalist diet.

[Interviewer (possibly a co-host or guest host)]

What is the milk composition like? You know, if analyzed kind of from a molecular standpoint or how would you describe it? I've heard it described as more nutritious than buffalo milk. But what exactly is in it?

[Josh Benoit]

It's just milk. So for the tsetse flies it's a lipocalen, an acid sphingomyelinase, a transferrin and then a kind of unknown milk protein family.

[Allie Ward]

So lipocales are just a type of protein. You will not be tested on this at all.

[Josh Benoit]

And then it has some protein and some lipids I get transferred over not a lot of sugar in that one. But it is really a class of lipocalens and that's what all the proteins is pretty much for that one. And it's Lipokalens are kind of these small proteins and they have a little pocket, they carry stuff in them and it's usually something like a fat soluble vitamins or something along those lines that can't be transferred very well in water. Water is probably being transferred with some specific fatty acid. So it's really just very similar to milk. And it's like mammalian milk as kind of make sure you have your kiddo to grow up big and strong is coming along in that milk.

[Sinead English]

Another interesting parallel with human milk is that they also have beneficial microbes which are transferred in the milk. And the cockroaches similarly have like specialized microbiota that's transmitted through the milk from the mother to their embryos.

[Allie Ward]

And in this week's Bloododiology episode with Dr. Dominic Evangelista, remember we talked about how one thing that makes a cockroach a cockroach is its wealth of endosymbionts. These little critters that live inside their guts and their butts. And they have this bladobacteria that live inside of their fat cells, kind of like a mitochondria. And this 2024 study titled Frequent and asymmetric cell division in endosymbiotic bacteria of cockroaches and mentioned that these intracellular buddies can help digest their waste to be reusable, which I hate to break it to you, but we cannot do that with rp. So special are these endosymbionts and bladder bacteria that some medical researchers think that they might be the key to a cockroach's hardiness and possibly, I don't know, maybe ours in the future. There's money in that cockroach. So in a moment, we will reveal what plans are in store for cockroach milk to reach your mouth. But first, let's donate to a worthy cause. And this week it went to supporting some grad students working on this important research. And thank you to sponsors of the show for making that donation possible. This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. So is my website. So is my life. I've said this before. I'll say it again. I had a Squarespace website right before this podcast launched. I was like, okay, I'm putting this baby out. I don't have a website. Boom. I made it literally in a night. So when someone comes to me asking about websites, I'm like, go to Squarespace. They give you everything you need to offer services and get paid. You can showcase consultations, you can showcase events to help build and attract your clients to grow your business. You can also get paid faster. They have professional invoices and easy online payments and easy to design. They have great design tools. Anyone can build a bespoke online presence that fits their brand or business. I love their templates. I love their drag and drop. 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[Interviewer (possibly a co-host or guest host)]

Okay.

[Allie Ward]

Will 2035 you be tipping a bottle of this into your cereal bowl?

[Interviewer (possibly a co-host or guest host)]

And what's been the interest in making this a commercial product? Because if something can be synthesized from cockroaches or collected from cockroaches and then made in bigger batches, has the food industry sort of knocked on the door to say, like, let's make a pretty good latte?

[Josh Benoit]

I think that may be a step too far for it. And so I think it's one of these ones where, like, it's always that kind of industrialization process where you have to move it to make it in bulk. Problem is, it's really hard to make these in bulk because when you make a lot of lipocalines artificially, it usually kills sometimes what you're making it in if it's not, not properly synthesized. The idea, yeah, it's more nutritious than these other milk aspects and that sort of thing. But taking it to like where we're having cockroach milk lattes at some point is probably. We would probably get it more from someone grinding up the cockroaches and boiling them and using that to make like a resource rather than an actual milk product.

[Allie Ward]

Yeah, people eat bugs. Arguably we should be eating more bugs. Fewer mammals, fewer animals. We have a whole entomophagy anthropology episode all about it. And you may find yourself after listening, ordering some cricket flour. Just so you know, I had two wedding cakes and one had cricket flour in it, courtesy of the wonderful lepidopterology butterfly guest, Phil Torres and his wonderful chef wife, Celia Torres, who I also talked about in the porcupine episode. But if you have a shellfish allergy, be careful with eating ground up cockroaches or bugs. So let's say, like me, you'd want to dip a pastry into just a smidge, a few milliliters of carefully harvested cockroach milk. Well, first you have to email a bunch of researchers and you have to beg them to spare some, which is nearly impossible.

[Interviewer (possibly a co-host or guest host)]

And how is the milk obtained? When you're milking a cockroach, it doesn't have little nipples on the outside.

[Josh Benoit]

Who says it doesn't have little nipples? I miss you so. No, it does not. So usually you use, you can obtain them by either removing it from the guts of the developing embryos. The other way is you can just put an absorbent material into the brood sac and pull that out every couple hours. So those are really the only two ways to do that. But no, there's no actual nipples involved in the milk processes of cockroaches or tsetse flies. Tsetse flies may be a little bit closer because they have like one gland that's all branched and comes to one individual spot where the mouth parts are right there. I mean, that's probably closer than what it is in the cockroach system.

[Interviewer (possibly a co-host or guest host)]

That sounds pretty nippley.

[Josh Benoit]

Yeah, but it's, it's internal though. So it's, it's an internal kind of location.

[Allie Ward]

I know, right? Now, you were thinking, Allie, you have done the unimaginable. You have obtained a few precious milliliters of cockroach milk which only a handful of people on Earth have ever held in their hands. Yes, I did. And it was worth making a donation to Josh's lab. Pay a heroic researcher named Gabrielle Lefebvre to do this milking. And I haven't fully crunched the numbers, but I suspect that this cockroach substance might be worth its actual weight in gold. But the day before the Tonight show taping this May, when tasting the cockroach milk on air got cut from my bug segment due to concerns from safety, Steve, I had to part with the cockroach milk temporarily. I hope one day I hope to get to taste it. Currently, there are two tiny vials of this cockroach milk. They're in the bug freezer and the entomology department at the wonderful American Museum of Natural History in New York. And if you work there, don't drink my cockroach milk in the office fridge. Sadly, it is too far away from my mouth right now.

[Sinead English]

Bummer.

[Interviewer (possibly a co-host or guest host)]

And I was crossing my fingers so hard, we were set to be able to taste some of this cockroach milk. You guys worked so hard. I and obtained a sample of a few milliliters for us. But can you describe sort of the consistency when this is in a small vial?

[Josh Benoit]

When it's in a small vial, when it's collected, you usually have to cut it with some sort of water thing. So we ended up pulling it out and dissolving it within pbs.

[Allie Ward]

PBS is lab speak, essentially for saline solution.

[Josh Benoit]

So it would be like the consistency of like 1% milk. And that's how Barbara Stay, who used to work on this system a long time ago, and Steve Tobe. That's how they actually characterize a lot of the proteins within it. They did the one where they put a little filter paper in there, collected it, and then dissolved that in, then said, oh, it turns out it has all these lipocalens within there. So it's really similar to kind of a 1% milk.

[Interviewer (possibly a co-host or guest host)]

What does it taste like?

[Josh Benoit]

I've never tasted it.

[Interviewer (possibly a co-host or guest host)]

How have you never tasted? If I had had access to this, I was ready to taste this on national television. I couldn't wait to get a drop of it. But you've never tasted it?

[Josh Benoit]

No, and I never would because I'm pretty sure. So I happened to marry a person who really, really hates insects and that sort of thing. And so I'm pretty sure if I ever actually did try it. She would probably not allow me to come home after admitting it for a few days. And she really does not like cockroaches either, so I'm pretty sure that's why I've just never tried it.

[Interviewer (possibly a co-host or guest host)]

You've never had one try to hitch a ride in your coat pocket or anything, have you?

[Josh Benoit]

No. The Diploptra are easy, as Sinead knows. They're easy to handle.

[Interviewer (possibly a co-host or guest host)]

They're fast, though. I was lucky enough to get to meet some Pacific beetle cockroaches. They're pretty fast suckers though, right?

[Sinead English]

Yeah. There's a reason why we use Madagascan hissing cockroaches for outreach with children holding them. And we keep the Pacific beetle cockroaches in a box because it takes a certain knack of how you can catch them and hold them. And you have to be quite calm almost to do that because they can be fast angry. I'm quite intrigued to taste it, actually. The milk. I haven't tasted it either. We've never done some work yet extracting it, but my husband's also a biologist and I don't think he would mind too much.

[Josh Benoit]

My wife's also a biologist, but she just does not like insects.

[Interviewer (possibly a co-host or guest host)]

So what's her study species?

[Josh Benoit]

She did her master's on chickens and now she works at the Children's Hospital in Cincinnati.

[Interviewer (possibly a co-host or guest host)]

And you eat eggs, I imagine?

[Josh Benoit]

Yeah.

[Interviewer (possibly a co-host or guest host)]

There's no tit for tat there, though.

[Josh Benoit]

No, not at all.

[Interviewer (possibly a co-host or guest host)]

Sinead, if you're ever in New York, I'm sure that the Natural History Museum would be happy to have you and I will send those emails. They do have some on ice.

[Allie Ward]

Yeah, they can.

[Sinead English]

They can defrost it for me. Yeah, put it in my coffee.

[Interviewer (possibly a co-host or guest host)]

How do you take your tea? Just a dab of cockroach milk.

[Sinead English]

Yeah, exactly.

[Allie Ward]

So now that you have this factoid, you can tell anyone who will listen every day you're just going to be, you know, looking on ebay for a ren faire tankard. You know, you're re streaming Brat in the fall. Whatever. Meanwhile, there are a few brilliant weirdos who go to working every day with more roaches than they can count.

[Interviewer (possibly a co-host or guest host)]

This is amazing. Thank you so much for chatting with me. Thank you for all the hard work in getting me the knowledge and information. And the cockroach milk. I just. This work has fascinated me since the first time I ever heard of it. So it's really an honor to get to talk to you. And when I got an email back that I was going to be able.

[Allie Ward]

To talk to you.

[Interviewer (possibly a co-host or guest host)]

I was like, you know, it was like a celebrity emailed me back. I was like, yes, I got to talk to the cockroach people.

[Josh Benoit]

I'll probably, I got a feeling I'll probably end up working with Sinead for probably the next 15, 20 years on this. I think there's more than enough to do.

[Sinead English]

There's so much.

[Allie Ward]

Yeah.

[Sinead English]

And there's so many other interesting other types of systems. Like, I just think it's really. Insects are so there's such an unknown frontier for some of these questions.

[Interviewer (possibly a co-host or guest host)]

I love it. Say hi to the cockroaches for me.

[Josh Benoit]

Will do.

[Allie Ward]

So ask interesting people entomological questions because when you get a chance, you just, you gotta milk it. Thank you again so much, Dr. Josh Benoit and Dr. Sinead English for sharing what you know, for answering a cold email from a lady across the country asking about bug lactation. I will keep you posted if I do ever get this stuff in my mouth, y'. All. Now for more on their work. And if you want to watch what did make it on the Tonight show segment in May, then you can see the links in the show notes and we have more links to studies [e-mail] Ologies Roachmilk. You can pass it on. Happy spooktober. We're Ologies on Instagram and Facebook. I'm Allie Ward with one L on both. We have shorter classroom safe and kid friendly episodes called Smallogies in their own separate feed. You can subscribe to wherever you get podcasts. It's also linked in the show notes. And thank you so much to producers Patrick Borelli, Adam Derman and Allison Hacker at the Tonight show for having me on. I loved every buggy minute of it. Thanks, Erin Talbert for admin in the Ologies podcast Facebook group. Avileen Malik makes our professional transcripts. Kelly A.R. dwyer works on the website. Noel Dilworth is our scheduling producer. Managing director Susan Hale Rangel's Like a Bunch of roaches. Jake Chaffee cuts our audio and lead editor and producer of this episode was Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio. Amazing work, everyone. On this app. Nick Thorburn made the theme music and if you stick around till the end of the episode, I tell you a secret and I will be real with you. I was really nervous to show these alive and very quick and squiggly bugs to these skittish celebrities on tv and I was worried that my hands would shake on camera. And I was talking to a scientist friend who was like, dude, I take a Beta blocker before every conference presentation. And this person is the sanest person I know. And I called my doctor and I was like, hey doc, we live in la. You ever prescribe a little beta blocker to help people with nerves? And she was like, are you kidding me? All the time. So she hooked me up with a little legally, I gotta say, folks, I was clear headed. No shaking hands, normal heartbeat. Please do not take this without the advice of your physician. But it did come in clutch. So to the friend who gave me that hot take. You know who you are. Thank you for helping me handle scorpions in front of so many people. It was not the scorpions that scared me. Okay, drink up. Bye bye. Pachydermatology, homeology, cryptozoology, litology, nanotechnology, meteorology, olfactology, nephology, serology, selenology. I look in the mirror and I go, take that beta blocker, girl. Swallow it down and lock in. Have you ever gotten something and been like, whoa, I never thought I would like this this much. Okay, here's one of those things. I got a mill food recycler. It's great. One thing we can do to have an impact on the planet is we can keep food out of the trash. This is why I love having a mill. It takes almost anything. You got food scraps. You have chicken bones, you have stuff that would normally be stinky in your trash and instead you put it in the mill. Looks kind of like a laundry hamper. As you sleep, it transforms your food scraps into these nutrient rich grounds for the garden. You can put it in the compost or milk can get them to a farm for you. You can fill it for weeks. It never smells. It is the easiest way to cut down on food waste at home. It is not messy, it is not stressy. A mill food recycler is something that makes those days when you're cleaning out the fridge so much less stressful. And it really takes the rot out of food waste. Our kitchen smells and feels cleaner and it makes it easy to do something good for the planet and keep food waste out of landfills. So if you're like, get me one of them, I'll help you out. You can get 75 off with the code ALI A L I [e-mail] Ologies it's code AL.com Ologies I love ours.

[Josh Benoit]

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