Bonus Episode: COCKROACH MILK with Joshua Benoit and Sinead English

Cockroach milk for Spooktober. STAY HERE. Don’t tell me you like haunted houses and slasher films but can’t listen to a lovely conversation about how cockroaches make milk to feed their young. It’s one of the most nutritious substances on Earth, and I own some. Sort of. Coem along for a brief and enthralling discussion from two researchers, Dr. Joshua Benoit and Dr. Sinead English, all about why and how some insects give live birth and nurse their young. What does it taste like? Will we replicate it for barista use? And why didn’t I get to eat any on TV?

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alie Ward?

  This episode is sponsored by Seed. Bloating, irregular bowel movement, gas. When your gut is off, it gets your attention. Seed's DS1 is a three-time award-winning probiotic, clinically shown to improve regularity, reduce bloating, and alleviate gas so you can move and eat freely. Take better care of your gut with Seed. Get 25% off with code 25OLOGIES at seed.com/ologies. These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. We have to say that. How's your ponytail looking? Maybe like a little thinner than it used to? We've talked about this in our menopause episode. At some point, it's bound to happen to all of us.

• 0:44Alie Ward?

  So if you're ready for thicker, fuller hair, start your free online visit today at forhers.com/ologies for personalized care. So that's F-O-R-H-E-R-S.com/ologies. Individual results may vary. Featured products include compounded drug products, which the FDA does not approve or verify for safety, effectiveness, or quality. Prescription required. Price varies based on product and subscription plan. See website for full details, restrictions, and important safety information. Ugh, trips are full of unexpected discoveries. Maybe you see a sea slug, or you find out that your friend still sleeps with a stuffed animal. But when it comes to your vacation rental, there should not be any surprises. When you book a Verbo vacation rental, if what you expect isn't what you get, Verbo Care has you covered. If something's broken or just not right,

• 1:29Alie Ward?

  Verbo will work to make it right. Plus, you get 24/7 live human support with every booking. Grab your stuffy, we're going on vacay. So book today on the Verbo app. If you know, you're Verbo. Terms apply. See verbo.com/trust for details. Oh, hey, it's the convo you're overhearing at a cafe. And this is Ologies. I'm Ally 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 larvae

• 2:11Alie Ward?

  and scorpions and this bird-eating tarantula. I put a cat-eyeing praying mantis on Jimmy Fallon's face.

• 2:21Alie Ward?

  No, there you go.

• 2:22Speaker 01

  She wants to go to me.

• 2:23Alie Ward?

  She wants to go to you. We can put one on you.

• 2:25Speaker 01

  She doesn't want to go with him. Did you see?

• 2:27Speaker 02

  Being very confident about this.

• 2:30Alie Ward?

  Oh, yeah. Look at you, Samma.

• 2:32Speaker 02

  Samma, I-

• 2:33Speaker 01

  I like her.

• 2:33Alie Ward?

  Yeah, you made a new friend.

• 2:35Speaker 02

  This is nice.

• 2:35Alie 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.

• 3:19Alie Ward?

  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, 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,

• 4:04Alie Ward?

  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,

• 4:49Alie Ward?

  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 Cetaceae flies and of course, our beloved milky mama roach Diploptera punctata. So we're doing it. Okay. You come on, it's cool. You're gonna love this. There you go.

• 5:41Speaker 03

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

• 5:49Speaker 04

  Hi, I'm Josh Benoit. I'm a professor of Biological Sciences and I'm at the University of Cincinnati.

• 5:55Alie 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 Cetaceae flies, which are vectors for this sub-Saharan disease called sleeping sickness. Now, Sinead still works on Cetaceae 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: Cetaceae Flies

• 6:39Alie Ward?

  as a Unique Research System to Stop Climate change. So let's get down 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?

• 7:03Speaker 04

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

• 7:25Alie Ward?

  Baby on board, that kind of thing.

• 7:27Speaker 04

  The cockroaches have a whole bunch of very small embryo like baby cockroaches in a brood sack, which is like a pseudo placenta. 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, the two of the major models are the cockroach and the C T flies.

• 7:52Alie Ward?

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

• 8:03Speaker 03

  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.

• 8:23Alie Ward?

  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 Blatyodiology 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.

• 8:58Speaker 03

  It's more common in flies compared to cockroaches.

• 9:01Speaker 04

  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.

• 9:13Alie Ward?

  What?

• 9:13Speaker 04

  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, you 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.

• 9:32Alie Ward?

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

• 9:44Speaker 03

  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.

• 10:01Alie Ward?

  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.

• 10:29Speaker 03

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

• 10:39Alie Ward?

  Mm hmm.

• 10:40Speaker 04

  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 her 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.

• 11:06Speaker 03

  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. We have the nourishing that happens in utero and then you have lactation afterwards.

• 11:37Alie Ward?

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

• 11:44Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 11:44Alie Ward?

  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. Hmm? I'm out. How long are they pregnant for?

• 12:22Speaker 04

  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 Cetaceae flies, they're only about nine or 10 days. We'll get you out of here. Okay?

• 12:42Alie Ward?

  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?

• 13:00Speaker 04

  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 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 chloric, 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 they're in. And so they end up eating that. And then it's just continually produced throughout the pregnancy cycle.

• 13:44Speaker 04

  It provides everything and they 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. And if they just emerged from the egg.

• 13:58Alie Ward?

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

• 14:11Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 14:12Alie Ward?

  How many babies is she tapioca puddinging at a time?

• 14:18Speaker 04

  That ranges from eight, sometimes 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 car come out and you see like the 20 clowns exit the car. Cause 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

• 15:01Speaker 04

  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 sac.

• 15:11Alie Ward?

  Oh, my God.

• 15:12Speaker 04

  It's like a clown car.

• 15:14Alie Ward?

  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?

• 15:44Speaker 03

  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.

• 16:09Alie Ward?

  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?

• 16:22Speaker 04

  It's just milk. So for the Cetaceae flies, it's a lipocalin, an acid sphenomylanase, a transferrin, and then a kind of unknown milk protein family.

• 16:34Alie Ward?

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

• 16:39Speaker 04

  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 lipocalins. And that's what all the proteins is pretty much for that one. And it's lipocalins, like kind of these small proteins, and they have a little pocket that 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 acids. So it's really just very similar to milk. And it's like mammalian milk as kind of. And make sure you have your kiddo to grow up big and strong is coming along in that milk.

• 17:23Speaker 03

  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.

• 17:37Alie Ward?

  And in this week's blood odiology 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 bladder bacteria 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

• 18:21Alie Ward?

  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. How's your ponytail looking? Maybe like a little thinner than it used to? We've talked about this in our menopause episode. At some point, it's bound to happen to all of us. So if you're ready for thicker, fuller hair, start your free online visit today at forhers.com/ologies for personalized care. So that's F O R H E R S dot com slash

• 19:06Alie Ward?

  ologies. Individual results may vary. Featured products include compounded drug products, which the FDA does not approve or verify for safety, effectiveness, or quality. Prescription required. Price varies based on product and subscription plan. See website for full details, restrictions, and important safety information. This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. If you haven't heard me gushing about Squarespace for years, it's an all in one website platform, whether you're trying to grow a business you have, or if you're just a bit. Baby business getting started, it has everything you need. That's where I secured my domain name. It helped me build a professional site. I can update it so easily. I've been using Squarespace since before Ologies existed. After procrastinating for years, I literally built my website in one evening. They have templates, they have flexible editing tools. Squarespace also makes it easy to share your work.

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• 22:18Alie Ward?

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

• 22:44Speaker 04

  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 lipocalcin 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, um,

• 23:22Speaker 04

  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.

• 23:31Alie 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 With 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.

• 24:16Alie Ward?

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

• 24:25Speaker 04

  Who says it doesn't have little nipples?

• 24:28Alie Ward?

  Does it?

• 24:29Speaker 04

  No, it does not.

• 24:33Speaker 04

  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 sac and pull that out every couple of 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 CT5s. CT5s 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.

• 25:14Alie Ward?

  That sounds pretty nipply to me.

• 25:16Speaker 04

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

• 25:21Alie Ward?

  I know right now you were thinking, Ally, 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, hey, 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 for 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 there in the bug freezer in

• 26:04Alie Ward?

  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.

• 26:17Alie Ward?

  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?

• 26:38Speaker 04

  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.

• 26:47Alie Ward?

  PBS is lab speak essentially for saline solution.

• 26:50Speaker 04

  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 Tobey, 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 lipocalines within there. So it's really similar to kind of a 1% milk.

• 27:18Alie Ward?

  What does it taste like?

• 27:19Speaker 04

  I've never tasted it.

• 27:21Alie Ward?

  How have you never tasted? If I, 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?

• 27:34Speaker 04

  No, and I never would because I'm pretty sure. So I happened to marry a person who really, really hates insects.

• 27:45Speaker 04

  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'd 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.

• 28:03Alie Ward?

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

• 28:07Speaker 04

  No, they're, the diplopt are easy. As Sinead knows, they're, they're easy to handle.

• 28:12Alie Ward?

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

• 28:19Speaker 03

  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 they, 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, I agree. 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 um, my husband's also a biologist and I don't think he would mind too much.

• 28:47Speaker 04

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

• 28:52Alie Ward?

  What's her study species?

• 28:53Speaker 04

  She did her masters on chickens and now she works at the children's hospital in Cincinnati.

• 28:58Alie Ward?

  And you eat eggs, I imagine?

• 29:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 29:01Alie Ward?

  There's no tit for tat there, though?

• 29:03Speaker 04

  No, not at all.

• 29:05Alie Ward?

  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, essentially.

• 29:16Speaker 03

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

• 29:21Alie Ward?

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

• 29:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 29:26Alie Ward?

  So now that you have this factoid, you can tell anyone who will listen. Every day, you're just gonna be, you know, looking on eBay for a Renfear tankard. You know, your 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 gonna 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.

• 30:09Speaker 04

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

• 30:17Speaker 04

  I think there's more than enough to do.

• 30:18Speaker 03

  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.

• 30:29Alie Ward?

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

• 30:31Speaker 04

  Will do.

• 30:35Alie 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 up at aliward.com/ologies/roachmilk. You can pass it on. Happy Spooktober. We're at Ologies on Instagram and Facebook. I'm at @aliward 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 wherever you get podcasts. It's also linked

• 31:20Alie Ward?

  in the show notes. And thank you so much to producers Patrick Borelli, Adam German, and Alison Hacker at The Tonight Show for having me on. I loved every buggy minute of it. Thanks, Erin Talbert, for adminning the Ologies Podcast Facebook group. Avaleen Malik makes our professional transcripts. Callie Arndt-Wire works on the website. Noelle Dilworth is our scheduling producer. Managing Director Susan Hale wrangles us 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 until 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, squiggly bugs to these skittish celebrities on TV. And I was worried that

• 32:05Alie Ward?

  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 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.

• 33:06Speaker 05

  I look in the mirror and I go, "Take that beta blocker girl. Swallow it down and block it."

• 33:14Speaker 05

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• 33:59Speaker 05

  and toes. Common side effect is nausea. For full prescribing information, call 1-833-4-NURTEC or visit Nurtec.com. All right, back to your podcast, playlist, or whatever's keeping you going today. Hi, I'm Angie Hicks, co-founder of Angie. And one thing I've learned is that you buy a house, but you make it a home. Because with every fix, update, and renovation, it becomes a little more your own. So you need all your jobs done well. For nearly 30 years, Angie has helped millions of homeowners hire skilled pros for the projects that matter. From plumbing to electrical, roof repair to deck upgrades. So leave it to the pros who will get your jobs done well. Angie, the one you trust to find the ones you trust. Find a pro for your project at Angie.com.