Dr. Joshua (Josh) Benoit

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 tsetse flies, they're only about nine or 10 days.

We'll get you out of here.

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.

Hmm.

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 wanna 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.

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 sack.

And so then as they emerge, they fill with air to kind of reach their full size.