Dr. Sinead English

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.

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.

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

Yeah, they can defrost it for me.

Put it in my coffee.

Yeah, exactly.

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, there's such an unknown frontier for some of these questions.