Dr. Joshua (Josh) Benoit

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.

No, it does not.

So usually 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.

Yeah, but it's internal though.

So it's an internal kind of location.

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.

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 lipokalins within there.

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

What does it taste like?