Dr. Joshua (Josh) Benoit

Hi, I'm Josh Benoit.

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

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 the uterus.

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 really, two of the major models are the cockroach and the tsetse flies.

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 probably five or six times more in insects.

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

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 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 or 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.

It's a long time.

It's about 70 to 90 days.