Bonus Episode: COCKROACH MILK with Joshua Benoit and Sinead English

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Oh, hey, it's the convo you're overhearing at a cafe, and this is ologies.

I'm Allie 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 Sama Hayek some beetle larva and scorpions and this bird-eating tarantula.

I put a cat-eye praying mantis on Jimmy Fallon's face.

I'm not looking.

No, there you go.

Oh, she wants to go to you.

We can hit one of you.

She doesn't want to go to the house.

Oh, yeah, with him.

You did you see?

Seem very

Oh yeah, look at you, Selma.

Selma, I.

I like her.

Yeah, you made a new friend.

This is nice.

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 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 Peregrindis, who left a review saying, Everything in the whole wide world is riveting, soul-saving for our times thank you peregrindis i don't know how to say your name but i like your review also hey fiana 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 uh 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's 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, Ali, 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 it makes milk for its babies.

So let's get into the hows and the whys and the whats of insects that nurse their young, including seetse flies and, of course, our beloved milky mama roach, Diploptera punctata.

So we're doing it.

Okay,

come on.

It's cool.

You're going to love this.

There you go.

Hi, I'm Sinead English and I'm a Future Leaders Fellow and an Associate Professor at the University of Bristol in the UK.

Hi, I'm Josh Benoit.

I'm a professor of biological sciences and I'm at the University of Cincinnati.

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 tzitzi flies, which are vectors for this sub-Saharan disease called sleeping sickness.

Now, Sinead still works on tzitzi 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, Tsetzi 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 got to cover these expecting mamas who are bugs.

Do bugs get pregnant?

Are they what do you call them expecting?

I always hear with reptiles and insects maybe gravid.

And can you describe the difference between being pregnant and being gravid?

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 the CT flies have a little tiny fly maggot that they have in a uterus.

Baby on board, that kind of thing.

The cockroaches have a whole bunch of very small embryo-like baby cockroaches in a brood sac, which is like a pseudoplacenta.

So it's kind of like a placental-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 two of the major models are the cockroach and the CT flies.

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?

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 the only truly viviparous cockroaches.

So yeah, this single cockroach species that makes milk, Diploptera punctata, is a beetle mimic.

and 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 black totiology 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.

It's more common in flies compared to cockretches.

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.

What?

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 should probably five or six times more in insects.

And it may just be there's just more insect lineages for this to potentially happen.

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

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 predators helps you know increase the general evolutionary success of that species so in this environment if you have a hundred 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're 28 and you're living at home with your parents you can use this argument to justify finishing off the coffee creamer without replacing it.

But it it comes at a big cost because you can't do that for 100.

So then you have to kind of put a little bit more in investing in fewer that come out even more protected.

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 the like 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.

I think that actually, that resource uncertainty aspect is really interesting because that's one of the evolutionary reasons why they think lactations 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 to the way we have it in mammals where you have the nourishing that happens in utero, and then you have lactation afterwards.

And so, with this specific beetle cockroach, they do it at the same time.

They're pregnant while they're nursing.

Yeah.

So, let's get to the anatomy of this because, Josh, when I got to talk to you about this before, it 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 in a brood sack 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.

How long are they pregnant for?

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 sack and it can vary a little bit and there's some pliability with it, but it's a long time.

The seedsy flies, they're only about nine or ten days.

We'll get you out of here.

Okay.

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?

What?

How would you describe

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 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 larvae, 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.

And 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.

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?

Exactly.

How many babies is she

tapioca puddinging at a time?

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.

Woof.

And that was a pretty extreme case.

They're all deflated when they're in the brood sack.

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 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.

Listen, it's spooktober.

And if you need to know why cockroaches and clowns shiver your timbers, please enjoy our recent Sarah Psychology episode all about creepiness.

And yes, we do discuss clowns in it, but back to less creepy subjects, pregnant cockroaches.

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?

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, so 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.

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?

It's just milk.

So, for the CC flies, it's a lipokalin, an acid sphingomyelinase, a transferrin, and then a kind of unknown milk protein family.

So lipokalines are just a type of protein.

You will not be tested on this at all.

And then it has some protein.

and some lipids that get transferred over.

Not a lot of sugar in that one, but it is really a class of lipokalins.

And that's what all the proteins is pretty much for that one.

And it's lipokalins are kind of these small proteins, and they have a little pocket to like 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, is probably being transferred with some specific fatty acid.

So it's really just very similar to milk.

And it's like mammalian milk has kind of make sure you have your kiddo to grow up big and strong is coming along in that milk.

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.

And in this week's blackodiology 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 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.

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You got this.

Okay, will 2035 you be tipping a bottle of this into your cereal bowl?

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?

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 lipokalin artificially, it usually kills sometimes what you're making it in if it's 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.

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, you know, I had two wedding cakes and one had cricket flour flour in it, courtesy of the wonderful Lepidopterology butterfly guest, Phil Taurus, and his wonderful chef wife, Cilia Taurus, 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.

And how is the milk obtained when you're milking a cockroach?

It doesn't have little nipples on the outside.

Who says it doesn't have little nipples?

I mean,

so

does it?

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 like an absorbent material into the brood sack 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 seat sea flies.

Cetsi 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.

That sounds pretty nipply.

Yeah, but it's internal, though.

So it's an internal kind of location.

I know right now you are 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 in 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.

Bummer.

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 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?

When it's in a salvo and 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.

PBS is lab speak essentially for saline solution.

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 lipokalones within there.

So, it's really similar to kind of a 1% milk.

What does it taste like?

I've never tasted it.

How have you never tasted it?

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.

No, and I never would because I'm pretty sure.

So I happen 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 I've been eaten 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.

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

No, the Diplopter are easy.

As Sinead knows,

they're easy to handle.

They're fast, though.

I was lucky enough to get to meet some Pacific Beetle cockroaches.

They're pretty fast suckers though, right?

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 lack 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.

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

What's her study species?

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

And you eat eggs, I imagine.

Yeah.

There's no tip for Tat there, though.

No.

Okay.

Not at all.

Sineada, 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, essentially.

Yeah, they can defrost it for me.

Yeah.

Put it in my coffee.

How do you take your tea?

Just a dab of cockroach milk.

Yeah, exactly.

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 Renfair tankard.

You know, you're restreaming brat in the fall, whatever.

Meanwhile, there are a few brilliant weirdos who go to work every day with more roaches than they can count.

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 to talk to you, 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.

I'll probably, I got a feeling I'll probably end up working with Sinead for probably the next 15, 20 years.

I think there's more than enough to do.

There's so much, yeah.

And there's so many other interesting, other types of systems.

Like, I just think it's really, insects are so, they're such an unknown frontier for some of these questions.

I love it.

Say hi to the cockroaches for me.

Will do.

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 up at alleyward.com slash ologies slash roach milk.

You can pass it on.

Happy Spooktober.

We're at ologies on Instagram and Facebook.

I'm at Alley Ward with one L on both.

We have shorter, classroom-safe and kid-friendly episodes called Smologies in their own separate feed.

You can subscribe to where we get podcasts.

It's also linked in the show notes.

And thank you so much to producers Patrick Borrelli, Adam German, and Allison Hacker at the Tonight Show for having me on.

I loved every buggy minute of it.

Thanks, Aaron Talbert, for admitting the Ologies Podcast Facebook group.

Aveline Malik makes our professional transcripts.

Kelly Arnwire works on the website.

Noelle Dilworth is our scheduling producer.

Managing director Susan Hale wrangles us like a bunch of roaches.

Jake Chafee cuts our audio.

And lead editor and producer of this episode was Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio.

Amazing work, everyone, on this up.

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

live 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 took 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 tip, 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.

Pachodermatology, hobbyology, cryptozoology, litology, nanotechnology, meteorology, old methodology, mapology, seriology, self-logy.

I look in the mirror and I go, take that beta blocker, girl, swallow it down, and block it.

Hi, I'm Jenny Slate.

And believe it or not, someone is allowing us to have a podcast.

I'm I'm Gabe Leidman.

I'm Max Silvestri, and we've been friends for 20 years.

We like to reach out to kind of get advice on how to live our lives.

It's called I Need You Guys.

Should I give my baby fresh vegetables?

Can I drink the water at the hospital?

My landlord plays the trombone, and I can't ask him to stop.

You should make sure that you subscribe so that you never miss an episode.

I need you, girl.

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