Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot Com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick.
Speaker 1: And today I wanted to start with the question I'm
Speaker 1: going to try to do my best big lebowski boys.
Speaker 1: What makes some mammal? Uh? Yeah? Thinking about mammals, what
Speaker 1: are a few common features of mammals? Of course, we
Speaker 1: know that all mammals are vertebrates, along with birds, reptiles, amphibians,
Speaker 1: and fish, they get the backbone going on. Mammals, along
Speaker 1: with birds, are of course endothermic or warm blooded, which
Speaker 1: can that can sometimes be a misnomer because, as we've
Speaker 1: discussed before, there are cases where mammals can cool their
Speaker 1: bodies down quite a bit. Most mammals, excluding monotreams, have
Speaker 1: live berths rather than laying eggs. Mammals generally have hair
Speaker 1: as opposed to scales or feathers, right, unless they've lost
Speaker 1: that hair by becoming aquatic creatures or for reasons yet unknown, right,
Speaker 1: or for living underground, etceter Right, Yeah, yeah, and then
Speaker 1: we get to the big one, of course, It is
Speaker 1: that mammals nurse they're young, with milk, and this is
Speaker 1: one of the real miracles of nature. It is really,
Speaker 1: and we're not just We're not just saying that because
Speaker 1: milk has such an important role in human child rearing,
Speaker 1: or because humans have this weird thing where we drink
Speaker 1: the milk of other species, especially around the holidays. You know,
Speaker 1: this is kind of a slightly holiday themed episode because
Speaker 1: a lot of people drink eggnog boiled custard type drinks,
Speaker 1: which are more traditionally milk based. Is eggnog a dairy product.
Speaker 1: I thought it was made with eggs. I have no idea.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, there's cream in there. I mean, obviously if
Speaker 1: you can get the soy nog, which I have memories
Speaker 1: of being tasty, and yet this year I do. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I have memories. I see like I saw it in
Speaker 1: the store. I got kind of excited. I got a
Speaker 1: particular carton of soy nog, brought it back home to
Speaker 1: share with my son, Um who is Um Who's who's
Speaker 1: six and uh and he said, oh, this is good.
Speaker 1: This tastes like wet cold sugar. And I was like, yeah,
Speaker 1: it does kind of taste like wet cold sugar. It
Speaker 1: doesn't have this particular I don't want to damn all
Speaker 1: soy nog because I have to be remembering something real.
Speaker 1: But this particular one, yeah, did not have that fatty, creamy,
Speaker 1: uh finish to it anything, but like normal full fat
Speaker 1: milk products always does have a kind of strange sweetness
Speaker 1: to it. You're noticed the odd sweetness of skim milk.
Speaker 1: There's something feels a little off about it. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean it's been a while since I've had skim milk.
Speaker 1: I do tend to just use um, like soy milk,
Speaker 1: almond milk, coconut milk, that kind of thing these days. Um,
Speaker 1: And thus my desire to get in the Christmas spirit
Speaker 1: by buying soy nog. Right, But so okay, it's not
Speaker 1: just the role in human culture that we use the
Speaker 1: milk of other animals in our cuisine, which is pretty
Speaker 1: much objectively weird. I think that's one of those things
Speaker 1: aliens would come to Earth and see us doing and
Speaker 1: think was weird. But it's also that it's it's a
Speaker 1: deep part of what we are as an animal. The
Speaker 1: possession of memory glands and the rearing of children with
Speaker 1: milk is uh that that's like a main morphological feature
Speaker 1: of what it means to be a mammal. The word
Speaker 1: mammal basically means like breast beast. Yeah, we are a
Speaker 1: bunch of breastbeasts really so yes, it nourishes our offspring
Speaker 1: and in doing so helps to establish immune system competence
Speaker 1: as well. Now, the exact nutrient composition of milk is
Speaker 1: going to vary across a lot across species, and it
Speaker 1: also can change quite a bit depending on the different
Speaker 1: stages of lactation, which is something that's easy to overlook.
Speaker 1: Milk is not just necessarily oh, here's the here's the
Speaker 1: formula coming out, and know the formula will change. The
Speaker 1: actual nutrient load will will vary depending on the developmental
Speaker 1: stage of the young, So milk fat content and seals,
Speaker 1: for instance, can be as high as six. Meanwhile, it's
Speaker 1: basically nothing in wallabies. And speaking of wallabies, according to
Speaker 1: the Origin and Evolution of Lactation by Capuoso and Acres
Speaker 1: Posting two thousand nine, quote milk in the tamer wallaby
Speaker 1: that's uh. Macropus eugeny changes from a very dilute secretion
Speaker 1: containing primarily carbohydrate during early lactation to a more energy
Speaker 1: dense milk that contains substantial quantities of protein and fat
Speaker 1: during late phases of that left lactation. So that's a
Speaker 1: nice example of just how the the the the exact
Speaker 1: details of the milk will change during the course of
Speaker 1: the the young's growth. Now, we could probably devote a
Speaker 1: whole episode or multiple episodes in the future to the
Speaker 1: study of milk, true biological mammal milk, because that's a
Speaker 1: fascinating subject on its own, But today we wanted to
Speaker 1: focus on something even weirder, which is all of the
Speaker 1: non mammal quote milk that's out there. There has been
Speaker 1: an astonishing amount of research that I had not kept
Speaker 1: up with until diving into it recently about all about
Speaker 1: animals you would just never expect to produce milk, producing
Speaker 1: something like milk, Yeah, I have to say this also
Speaker 1: forced me to learn about a couple of different creatures
Speaker 1: I was not familiar with then we brought to my
Speaker 1: attention solely because they produced something that one might call milk.
Speaker 1: So this will be our anomalous milk episode. But before
Speaker 1: we get into the anomalous milk, I guess it's worth
Speaker 1: a quick look at actual mammal milk itself. Right now,
Speaker 1: I know You've done some episodes on dairy products and
Speaker 1: on mammal milk in the past, right, Yeah, there's there's
Speaker 1: an older episode that I did with Julie Douglas back
Speaker 1: in the day, and then more recently did an episode
Speaker 1: with Christians Say titled Uh Holy Butter. As the name implies,
Speaker 1: it's mostly about butter and how we make butter and
Speaker 1: some of the uses we have for better Did you
Speaker 1: all talk about bog butter? Yes, we did talk about
Speaker 1: bog butter. Bog butter is so good. Yeah, but we
Speaker 1: also talked about how butter and also milk, is nothing
Speaker 1: short of solar energy transformed through a few different steps
Speaker 1: into a food. For instance, there's the of course, the
Speaker 1: the alchemy of photosynthesis to kick things off. The grass
Speaker 1: in the field converts energy in the form of sunlight
Speaker 1: into chemical energy in the form of sugars and other carbohydrates.
Speaker 1: This is essentially the first miracle of milk. And then
Speaker 1: you have a female ruminant in this case cow, sheet, camel, water, buffalo, goats,
Speaker 1: et cetera. They consume that grass and truly, as Elaine
Speaker 1: Cosa Rova explores in her tremendous book, Butter a rich
Speaker 1: history Um, you're better off thinking of it as a
Speaker 1: processed harvesting rather than a meal, because ruminants are built
Speaker 1: to transform grass into milk. Uh. Consider that they have
Speaker 1: these three or four chambered stomachs. Uh. They're upper dental
Speaker 1: pad instead of teeth from massive for massicating green. And
Speaker 1: each animal puts its own particular chemical spin on the
Speaker 1: process as well. But they crunch up the greens and
Speaker 1: they ferment them in their mini chambered guts eight hours feeding,
Speaker 1: eight hours ruminating, and then the remains of the day resting,
Speaker 1: so that that masceration, the repeated chewing of the cud
Speaker 1: helps to carry out the second miracle of milk, the
Speaker 1: transformation of a low fat diet of grass into high
Speaker 1: fat milk. Yeah. You always wonder about that, right, Like
Speaker 1: you look at the beginning product in the end product,
Speaker 1: and you're like, I don't understand exactly what's happening here. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And and part of this is just the miracle digestion.
Speaker 1: The broken down food is assaulted by microbes and the
Speaker 1: oxygen free fermentation chamber of the gut, the grassy meal
Speaker 1: is broken down to the basic elements, strings of carbon
Speaker 1: and hydrogen molecules, and then other backed here recombine the
Speaker 1: elements into volat how fatty acids. Only half the fat
Speaker 1: comes from the cow's diet. The rest comes from the
Speaker 1: cow's own body fat. Oh wow. Yeah, And so it's
Speaker 1: sort of it's not just making a product out of
Speaker 1: what it just eight, but it's giving of itself when
Speaker 1: it creates milk. And I think that's one of the reasons,
Speaker 1: like we put the human layer on milk to write
Speaker 1: like milk is this this giving of something something to
Speaker 1: uh to to bring nourishment to another. And of course
Speaker 1: we have so many metaphors related to that, including of
Speaker 1: course that the milk of human kindness. But in this
Speaker 1: example talking just about ruminate milk. Um, it's a you know,
Speaker 1: fatty liquid to ensure the survival of the animals young
Speaker 1: and um. The exact composition again is going to vary
Speaker 1: from species to feat species, with additional factors depending on
Speaker 1: environment and diet. For instance, uh a new produces twice
Speaker 1: the fat content of cow milk, Goat milk has smaller,
Speaker 1: more digestible fat molecules, yak milk has less sugar and
Speaker 1: more protein, and camel's milk has three times as much
Speaker 1: vitamin C water. Buffalo milk has twice the fat of
Speaker 1: cow milk. And then we have things that are not
Speaker 1: even um, you know, we don't traditionally think of as
Speaker 1: milk producers. But consider the whales. Oh yeah, blue whales
Speaker 1: for instance. Uh this, this always blows my mind. Uh.
Speaker 1: A newborn blue whale gainst. Two hundred pounds a day
Speaker 1: just by nursing, and the average whale produces forty times
Speaker 1: more milk than a cow. And this has even led
Speaker 1: some scientists to consider the possibility of milking whales and
Speaker 1: specially prepared milking bays and then using that milk for
Speaker 1: human consumption. Is there really any milk of any animal
Speaker 1: that has not been considered for human consumption? UM? I
Speaker 1: don't know. I mean there's some that are certainly more attractive. Um.
Speaker 1: But anytime you start reading around about different milks, I
Speaker 1: feel like there's a good chance somebody's tasted it and
Speaker 1: they will tell you what the flavor profile is. What
Speaker 1: does rat milk taste like? What what does monkey milk
Speaker 1: pair with? I don't know. I have sometimes think about
Speaker 1: cat milk, like, what like tiger milk would taste like?
Speaker 1: Would it be did you know or who did have
Speaker 1: kind of a like a meati consistency to it, probably
Speaker 1: like a nice French washed rind cat milk cheese. I also,
Speaker 1: this is a topic that I discussed in that past
Speaker 1: episode with the the jew. It was of course the the
Speaker 1: the idea that you do have certain situations that can
Speaker 1: cause males to lactaatee as well. Uh, some do to
Speaker 1: some are more like behavioral environmental, and others have to
Speaker 1: do with their regularities in the body. But you also
Speaker 1: have certain male fruit bats that lactated, and these are
Speaker 1: the only examples of male mammals lactating as a part
Speaker 1: of a regular parental activity. Yeah, and you can see
Speaker 1: already in the idea of male animal lactation that there
Speaker 1: is going to be They're gonna be some like asterisks
Speaker 1: next to the official like dictionary definition of milk, which
Speaker 1: is something like an opaque white fluid that's rich and
Speaker 1: fat and protein that's secreted by female mammals for the
Speaker 1: nourishment of their young. So obviously there's not that's not
Speaker 1: quite all cases, because in some cases males secrete it
Speaker 1: like the bats you're just talking about. And then I
Speaker 1: guess the question comes in where if you have something
Speaker 1: that meets all those qualifications but is not produced by
Speaker 1: a mammal. Is that technically milk or not? I think
Speaker 1: a lot of biologists might say no, but they might
Speaker 1: still use the term in describing whatever this other substance is.
Speaker 1: What is the substance on the Simpsons that they're drinking
Speaker 1: in the school cafeteria. I think it's rat milk now
Speaker 1: with vitamin R. Oh, my bones they feel so brittle.
Speaker 1: But I always drink plenty of malk. Well, maybe it's mack,
Speaker 1: maybe it's milk. Well, whatever you call it, milk, malk,
Speaker 1: milk analog. There are clearly strong reasons that non mammalian
Speaker 1: animals would would have an incentive to secrete milk like
Speaker 1: fluids that they used to feed their young. It's a
Speaker 1: really useful strategy and it serves quite a few dif functions.
Speaker 1: I mean, for one thing, it allows the parent to
Speaker 1: produce food for their offspring without having to like leave
Speaker 1: or hunt or forage. You don't have to go out
Speaker 1: of the nest. Another thing is that it tightly controls
Speaker 1: the nutritional content of the offsprings food, making sure they
Speaker 1: get exactly what they need. And you can see that
Speaker 1: in the very different nutritional profiles of milk, like you
Speaker 1: were talking about earlier, like with wallabies and stuff. It's
Speaker 1: also a way for the young to eat all the
Speaker 1: mother without actually eating the mother. Yes, exactly, Uh yeah,
Speaker 1: and so it can. It can include extra nutrition, lots
Speaker 1: of fat and protein, maybe more fat and protein than
Speaker 1: you could expect to get from food sources in the environment.
Speaker 1: It's like super concentrating the nutrition profile for the young,
Speaker 1: which will help them speed up and grow faster. And
Speaker 1: then it can also deliver really important additives. Earlier you
Speaker 1: mentioned immune function, and that does seem to be a
Speaker 1: very important role of of milk and animals. The idea
Speaker 1: of stimulating the immune system with antibodies or supplementing the
Speaker 1: offsprings microbiome with microbiodelic commenceled bacteria from the mother. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I feel like this should come as no surprise following
Speaker 1: our poop eating eating animals episode, because obviously, if if
Speaker 1: eating a little um parental poop is going to provide
Speaker 1: that kind of a boost, obviously that kind of boost
Speaker 1: might be available via milk. And then on top of
Speaker 1: all that, like the additives for the immune system, you
Speaker 1: also can add hormones. This can be especially useful when
Speaker 1: it's like hormones that could have something to do with
Speaker 1: cementing the psychological bond between parent and child, or things
Speaker 1: like growth hormone to help speed up the growth of
Speaker 1: the young. So with some of that in mind, it
Speaker 1: might be less surprising what I'm about to say, which
Speaker 1: is that a number of bird species secrete a substance
Speaker 1: analogous to milk. I think we should look at a few, Robert,
Speaker 1: will you look at milk birds with me? Let's do it.
Speaker 1: How about pigeons. Pigeons both male and female, regurgitate a
Speaker 1: highly nutritious substance known as crop milk into the mouths
Speaker 1: of their young, and don't let the fact that it
Speaker 1: is delivered in the form of nourishing barf throw you off.
Speaker 1: This is not regurgitated food. This is not the parent
Speaker 1: bird providing a partially digested version of what they just date.
Speaker 1: Crop milk is a separate, original substance secreted in the
Speaker 1: crop organ. It's from the parent's body itself. Now the
Speaker 1: crop organ is I don't know if you've ever seen
Speaker 1: one of these, ROBBERTI, it's sort of have not. It's
Speaker 1: like a pouch area in the esophagus that can be
Speaker 1: used to store and moisten food before it continues on
Speaker 1: down the elementary tract for digestion. And I think it's
Speaker 1: thought that um the crop organ is useful for like
Speaker 1: prey species of birds that might be trying to gobble
Speaker 1: up a bunch of food really fast while they're out
Speaker 1: somewhere exposed and then be able to fly off quickly
Speaker 1: and reduce the amount of time they're out there eating
Speaker 1: and exposed to predators. So you want to be able
Speaker 1: to just like stuff it all in, like get it
Speaker 1: all down there really fast, and then get out of there,
Speaker 1: and then you can settle down somewhere safe and try
Speaker 1: to digest. It's a it's a it's a doggy bag
Speaker 1: essentially inside the body, Yes, exactly, it's it's your it's
Speaker 1: your styrofoam clam shell inside the bird's throat, and so
Speaker 1: the crop milk, it's actually produced by pigeons and doves.
Speaker 1: This is described in a paper I'll come back to
Speaker 1: in a minute as quote an oily, yellowish cheese like
Speaker 1: substance that is formed into small seed sized rice shaped pellets.
Speaker 1: I've also seen it described as cottage cheese but yellow. Well,
Speaker 1: this sounds fine. I have no objection to any of that. Okay.
Speaker 1: So apparently crop milk is produced by the inner cells
Speaker 1: of the crop pouch becoming moist and then sort of
Speaker 1: sloughing off into the pouch and then getting regurgitated. So
Speaker 1: it's like, here's some let me barf you up some
Speaker 1: of my highly nutritious inside skin. This is my flesh,
Speaker 1: et cetera. Right now. An interesting thing in birds and
Speaker 1: pigeons is that this process in parent pigeons is apparently
Speaker 1: controlled by the hormone prolactin, which is also what stimulates
Speaker 1: milk production in mammals. That's kind of interesting because you know,
Speaker 1: they don't have memory glands. It's not you would think
Speaker 1: that it would be something completely different, but it's pro
Speaker 1: lactin in both cases that gets the parent doing this.
Speaker 1: Crop milk tends to be mostly protein and fat, about
Speaker 1: six protein maybe thirty something percent fat, and then just
Speaker 1: a little bit of carbohydrates and minerals and other things
Speaker 1: in there. A two thousand twelve study in Plos One
Speaker 1: by Megan Gillespie at All found that if you took
Speaker 1: baby chickens and fed them crop milk from pigeons. They
Speaker 1: sort of became like little minor hulk chickens. After just
Speaker 1: seven days, the pigeon milk chickens were more than twelve
Speaker 1: percent heavier than control chickens. And also they showed greater
Speaker 1: diversity of gut bacterious specifically in the seaka um, and
Speaker 1: they had higher expression of the immunoglobulin I g A,
Speaker 1: which is an antibody class that's crucial for all kinds
Speaker 1: of immune system function. Now, a side question you might
Speaker 1: be wondering is why did they test this on chickens
Speaker 1: rather than on pigeons. I think the answer is that
Speaker 1: with pigeons you couldn't really have a control group because
Speaker 1: young pigeons would just die without the crop milk. And
Speaker 1: there I've read that there have been other studies that
Speaker 1: looked into this. They're like fed pigeon crop milk two
Speaker 1: chickens to see what happened, and the chickens always really
Speaker 1: beefed up. It. It's like it's clearly something that their
Speaker 1: bodies respond well to. But there are some other birds
Speaker 1: that also produce UH and feed their young with secretions
Speaker 1: from the upper digestive tract that are crop milk or
Speaker 1: something like it. Flamingos would be an example. According I
Speaker 1: was reading about the flamingo crop milk feeding on the
Speaker 1: San Diego Zoo website. They were talking about their flamingos.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, they have a great website, great outreach. Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: And so the a few things they mentioned. One is
Speaker 1: that apparently when young chicks flamingo chicks are hungry and
Speaker 1: they're calling out for feeding, it's not just their own parents.
Speaker 1: Other adults in the flock can be stimulated to act
Speaker 1: as sort of foster feeders, which is sweet, that's cool.
Speaker 1: And the way that seems to work is that they
Speaker 1: they suppose that hearing the sound of the hungry chicks
Speaker 1: calling for food stimulates the production of the milk like analog.
Speaker 1: And then also one of the things they say is
Speaker 1: that as the parent flamingos produce crop milk to feed
Speaker 1: their chicks, their feathers tend to be drained of color
Speaker 1: over time. So like if you've got an adult that's
Speaker 1: producing crop milk feeding a young one, it turns from
Speaker 1: pink to a pale pink or even to a white.
Speaker 1: And then after the they stopped producing it, they gradually
Speaker 1: get their color back. One more, of course, is emperor penguins.
Speaker 1: You may have heard about this, like, you know, the
Speaker 1: male emperor penguins guarding the the egg while the female
Speaker 1: goes off to feed. So that goes on. But what
Speaker 1: happens if the the young penguin hatches from the egg
Speaker 1: before the female returns from feeding with fish to regurgitate
Speaker 1: for it. Apparently the male penguin will do something like this,
Speaker 1: will generate some upper digestive tract milk to bar out
Speaker 1: for the little penguin, and the little penguin gets its
Speaker 1: nourishment that way. So again, it's it's certainly not milk,
Speaker 1: but it does seem to be meeting some of the
Speaker 1: criteria we've discussed. Well, it's a lot like milk nutritionally,
Speaker 1: it seems to serve a lot of the same functions
Speaker 1: and be composed in a pretty similar way. So I
Speaker 1: don't know, I don't know whether you should call it
Speaker 1: milk or not. I mean, again, I think if we
Speaker 1: go by the technical definition, milk is only produced by mammals,
Speaker 1: So it's not milk, but it looks like milk, It
Speaker 1: apparently tastes like milk, it does what milk does. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we could call it bird milk or or bird nog
Speaker 1: a holiday twist. That's good. Well, how about let let
Speaker 1: me take you to the next step. This one might
Speaker 1: seem unbelievable, but maybe just a tiny bit less. So,
Speaker 1: given that birds produce milk like secretions, what about dinohnog?
Speaker 1: So what are birds? They are the dinosaurs that survived
Speaker 1: the fifth extinction right there, the descendants of these feathered
Speaker 1: dinosaurs that survived when the thing that killed all the
Speaker 1: other dinosaurs. Now, given that modern birds exhibit a form
Speaker 1: of what might be considered lactation, is it possible that
Speaker 1: some dinosaurs also fed their young with milk like secretions.
Speaker 1: We don't know the answer to this, but exactly this
Speaker 1: question is explored by the Australian molecular biologist Paul Else
Speaker 1: in a Journal of Experimental Biology paper called Dinosaur Lactation.
Speaker 1: It's like Chariots of the Gods. You know, if you
Speaker 1: end it with a question mark, you're always safe. It's
Speaker 1: not in all caps, though, I will say that that
Speaker 1: is a good point, but no, that this is a
Speaker 1: fun question. So he says, you know, if dinosaurs did
Speaker 1: perform something analogous to lactation, we don't know, but if
Speaker 1: they did, it's another one of the many soft tissue
Speaker 1: based biological features that are just going to be extremely
Speaker 1: difficult to infer from postilized remains. The bones don't usually
Speaker 1: tell us things like that, So the only way to
Speaker 1: try to answer this kind of question is to look
Speaker 1: at the indirect evidence. And so he's got a few
Speaker 1: thoughts here. One of them is about the initial size
Speaker 1: difference between adults and hatchlings of some dinosaur species, especially
Speaker 1: the sauropods. Yeah, yeah, so he says, like, you know,
Speaker 1: it almost seems as if it would present mechanical problems
Speaker 1: and feeding. He said to I believe this was to
Speaker 1: a campus newspaper. He was speaking about his paper to quote,
Speaker 1: although I work at the molecular level, I'm basically a
Speaker 1: comparative physiologist, and one thing that always struck me as
Speaker 1: unresolved about dinosaurs was how a dinosaur parent of several
Speaker 1: tons could feed young of only a few kilograms. It
Speaker 1: seemed obvious a form of lactation similar to that present
Speaker 1: in birds. And then in his paper he writes, quote
Speaker 1: lactation might free large parents from having to feed their
Speaker 1: newly hatched young the regurgitated products of their own meals
Speaker 1: that might be unsued did for altricial young based on
Speaker 1: digestive systems unfamiliar with coarse fodder like you know, rough
Speaker 1: plant matter that adults would be eating, and essential nutrient
Speaker 1: requirements to promote rapid growth, and replace this with secret
Speaker 1: secretory products. Oh, that's a hard word. Secretary uh synthesized
Speaker 1: by the four gut that are more suited to supporting
Speaker 1: rapid development. So again there's obviously some kind of incentive
Speaker 1: there would be if they could produce something like this.
Speaker 1: We don't know if they could, and so if we
Speaker 1: entertain that possibility for a second, the dinosaurs produced milk
Speaker 1: for their young, it's likely they did it in the
Speaker 1: same way as birds rather than like mammals do. So
Speaker 1: that would probably mean nutrient rich secretions from the upper
Speaker 1: digestive tract that would be barfed up into little the
Speaker 1: little dinosaurs mouths, and paleontologists have discovered evidence that many
Speaker 1: dinosaur hatchlings grew very quickly. We do seem to have
Speaker 1: evidence for that closer to the growth rate of birds
Speaker 1: and mammals than of reptiles, and a nutrient rich parental
Speaker 1: secret shin especially if it contained these helpful bioadditives like
Speaker 1: antibodies and growth hormone, as it does in the case
Speaker 1: of some birds, could help explain this rapid growth, But unfortunately,
Speaker 1: there's currently no direct evidence for dinosaur milk. Maybe in
Speaker 1: the future some paleontologists will come up with a with
Speaker 1: a clever way of proving that dinosaurs made crop milk.
Speaker 1: That would be awesome. Yeah, maybe, I mean that's if
Speaker 1: we ever get Jurassic Park. That's one of the things
Speaker 1: that we can also achieve a chance to sample all
Speaker 1: the various dinosaur milks. I wonder which which one would
Speaker 1: you prefer if you had to have some dinosaur nog
Speaker 1: which species? Oh, I'd probably want to go with a
Speaker 1: herbivore milk. I don't know if i'd want to try
Speaker 1: out a carnivorous dinosaur milk. I think I could probably
Speaker 1: go for what pisar Lofus. I feel like that it
Speaker 1: looks like a good milk dina. How about packy cephalosaurus.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, the big cranial head butters right, yeah, I
Speaker 1: think yeah, those are those are those are good good
Speaker 1: choices that themselves to certain branding, you know, like one
Speaker 1: is kind of like the brain milk, uh you know,
Speaker 1: you really want to, you know, smack craniums with with
Speaker 1: your your your coworker as well, and then you need
Speaker 1: a you need a bone up on this stuff about
Speaker 1: try saranogue. Try saranogue is good. Yeah, we'll come back
Speaker 1: to it. This is what I'm going to keep my
Speaker 1: eye on for years. I'm always going to have it
Speaker 1: in the back of my mind, waiting for that paper
Speaker 1: that says dinosaurs did have crop organs, they produced milk.
Speaker 1: All right, should we take a quick break, Let's do it,
Speaker 1: Thank you, Thank alright, we're back. We're talking about strange milk,
Speaker 1: milk like substances produced by non mamalion creatures. Now, remember
Speaker 1: in the episode we did about amphibians with special guest
Speaker 1: Markman Decau, he was discussing these amazing creatures called Sicilians,
Speaker 1: not the people from Sicily, but it is spelled c
Speaker 1: A E C I L I A N. Sicilians are
Speaker 1: amphibians like frogs and salam anders, but unlike frogs and salamanders,
Speaker 1: sicilians are completely without legs. Most Sicilians live underground, so
Speaker 1: we rarely see them, and if you do see one,
Speaker 1: you might mistake it for a huge worm. They kind
Speaker 1: of look like moist, greasy snakes, So they're sounding more
Speaker 1: and more like just like an awesome candidate for milk
Speaker 1: like substance production. Right, So can you milk a Sicilian? Uh?
Speaker 1: Not exactly, but they do provide their young with nourishing
Speaker 1: secretions that are sort of milk analogs. There was a
Speaker 1: paper by Alexander cup For a bunch of other authors
Speaker 1: Alexander cup for at All, published in Nature in two
Speaker 1: thousand six called parental investment by skin feeding in a
Speaker 1: Sicilian Amphibian. The short version of this is that after
Speaker 1: the mother of a Sicilian species called boulanger Ulia titanus,
Speaker 1: after she gives birth, she transforms the outer layer of
Speaker 1: her skin into a nutrient rich meal for her young
Speaker 1: offsp ring. And then the young developed quote a specialized
Speaker 1: dentition which they used to peel and eat the outer
Speaker 1: layer of their mother's modified skin. So basically, mom turns
Speaker 1: her skin into cheese, and these juvenile worm like creatures
Speaker 1: develop special baby teeth that are designed specifically for eating
Speaker 1: mom's milk skin. What I love about this example is
Speaker 1: that not only is it kind of delightfully grotesque and
Speaker 1: again weirder than anything we could dream up for our
Speaker 1: horror movies. Uh. It also, even though it's not milk,
Speaker 1: it is a milk like behavior. It forces you to
Speaker 1: re evaluate what milk is as a mammalion feature. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: are are you saying that even among mammals we should
Speaker 1: think about it more like this parent is just ripping
Speaker 1: off part of their body to give to their young. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think so. But you know, I I have it.
Speaker 1: I have heard mothers, nursing mothers like speak of it
Speaker 1: in this in this way, you know where they are,
Speaker 1: and I would love to hear from from from anyone
Speaker 1: out there has had this experience where they're where they're like,
Speaker 1: this is so bizarre, Like I'm all, I'm basically turning
Speaker 1: my body into this substance and feeding this little larval
Speaker 1: human creature. You know, it's I have frequently heard mothers
Speaker 1: speak about the weirdness of the whole scenario, but I
Speaker 1: feel like it is a weird There's something about milk
Speaker 1: that for the rest of the time and for many
Speaker 1: of us, we just take it for granted. Yeah, it's amazing.
Speaker 1: We we forget to appreciate the weirdness of reality in
Speaker 1: so many ways. But this is another one of them.
Speaker 1: It's crazy, it's amazing, it's around us every day. It's
Speaker 1: a whole aisle at the grocery store, and it's a
Speaker 1: crucial part of human life. Uh and yeah, when you
Speaker 1: just stop and appreciate the biological realities of it, it
Speaker 1: is startling. Oh. But one thing I wanted to address
Speaker 1: about the Sicilians here, so I want to already quote
Speaker 1: from the abstract uh So quote. This new form of
Speaker 1: parental care provides a plausible intermediate stage and the evolution
Speaker 1: of viviparity, which is live birth in Sicilians at independence
Speaker 1: offspring of viviparous and oviparous which means egg laying dermato trophic,
Speaker 1: which means skin eating. Sicilians are relatively large despite being
Speaker 1: provided with relatively little yolk. The specialized dentition of skin
Speaker 1: feeding or dermato vegas uh. Sicilians may constitute a pre
Speaker 1: adaptation to the fetal feeding on the oviduct lining of
Speaker 1: viviparous sicilians. So there's a lot of Latin words, but
Speaker 1: in other words, the eggs have the advantage of containing
Speaker 1: a yolk that the young can feed on. And of
Speaker 1: course this is why egg yolks are delicious, it's everything
Speaker 1: a growing body needs. And live birth instead has the
Speaker 1: young development feed inside the mother until they're viable to
Speaker 1: move around and survive on their own. Species who is
Speaker 1: young have this intermediate stage where eating their mother's butter
Speaker 1: skin as a yolk substitute or a supplement could be
Speaker 1: a could be an evolutionary stepping stone between these two
Speaker 1: lines of birth. Yeah. So that then also this connection
Speaker 1: between what yolk essentially is and what milk essentially is.
Speaker 1: It's like the the offspring is spat out. It's like whoa, mom,
Speaker 1: there wasn't enough yolk there. Uh, oh, don't worry. I
Speaker 1: have something that is like yolk that I will now
Speaker 1: produce for you to consume. It is very much like yolk,
Speaker 1: and again both both are involved in egg knock. So connection.
Speaker 1: Think about the nutritional parallels between egg yolks and milk.
Speaker 1: They tend to be high and protein high and fat
Speaker 1: good for growing young bodies. Guess, both useful and making
Speaker 1: like a a frothy mixed drink like like a ramos
Speaker 1: gin fizz or something. Wait does that egg yolk or
Speaker 1: egg white? Uh? That is usually just the egg um
Speaker 1: egg whitey, though you know, there are other drinks that
Speaker 1: call for the egg yolk as well. I haven't experimented
Speaker 1: with as many of those. And of course there are
Speaker 1: put plenty of drinks that also call for for milk.
Speaker 1: I mean egg knock is a great example of that,
Speaker 1: because that is tipped that is often paired with some
Speaker 1: sort of a liquor. What's that drink called where you
Speaker 1: just have a beer and you crack an egg in it? Oh,
Speaker 1: I don't know, is that like they drink it on
Speaker 1: the wire? I think I don't remember the name of
Speaker 1: that one, like the Dockworkers Breakfast, the Champions or something.
Speaker 1: Never tried it? All right, Robert, have you have you
Speaker 1: got some strange milk for us? Yeah? So you know,
Speaker 1: we're talking about birds, it only, you know, makes sense
Speaker 1: that we would also turn to the world of fish. Okay,
Speaker 1: So in particular, we're talking about the discus fish, which
Speaker 1: is an Amazonian chick lit species. It's a rather unique
Speaker 1: fish because both mother and father provide sustenance for their
Speaker 1: hatchlings via mucous secretions. And of course this isn't simply
Speaker 1: a matter of hatchlings like nipping some mucus from their
Speaker 1: parents and then swimming off. This can go on for
Speaker 1: a month or so. Oh wow, so it's prolonged. Yeah, yea.
Speaker 1: So it's worth remembering that with the with a fish
Speaker 1: slime and mucus or or mucus that they're very important.
Speaker 1: It's not merely the stuff that's on their scales, but
Speaker 1: it constitutes a protective outer layer of their bodies and
Speaker 1: it provides a number of key benefits. UM. One of
Speaker 1: the big ones that's going to be important here is
Speaker 1: UH osmo regulation or gas transport, and this is to
Speaker 1: maintain the internal external osmotic balance UM also sometimes referred
Speaker 1: to you know, dermal respiration UH. In addition to this,
Speaker 1: the mucus or slime provides external protection. It can reduce turbulence,
Speaker 1: and there are other varieties of fish that also use
Speaker 1: it as a toxin rich outer coating, so it can
Speaker 1: be protective. Even if it doesn't have toxins in it,
Speaker 1: it can provide some level of protection. You have other
Speaker 1: particularly slimy fish like the hag fish that use it
Speaker 1: to their advantage. UH. It can also mucus also conserve
Speaker 1: for water cleansing purposes. It can also form It can
Speaker 1: also serve a purpose in the cocoon formation in the
Speaker 1: case of the African lungfish, and some fish also eat
Speaker 1: their own mucus. So a two thousand ten study looked
Speaker 1: into this. It was titled Biparental mucus feeding a Unique
Speaker 1: Example of Parent Care in an Amazonian chicklet by Buckley
Speaker 1: at All, published in the Journal of Experimental Biology. So
Speaker 1: basically they broke down not only the nutrient and immunity
Speaker 1: load of the mucus, but also how it all changed
Speaker 1: depending on the developmental level of the offspring, very much
Speaker 1: in line with the milk production of mammals as we
Speaker 1: discussed earlier. You know, again, remember how milk changes to
Speaker 1: meet the growing offsprings needs. The authors pointed out that
Speaker 1: like the peak level of mucus, antibody up provision was
Speaker 1: seen as offspring reached the free swimming stage, and this suggested,
Speaker 1: you know, a role that's very much like what is
Speaker 1: provided by mammals. Again, so that you know that there's
Speaker 1: a winging off here. Um. You know. They pointed out
Speaker 1: that the protein was lowest during the second and third
Speaker 1: weeks of free swimming during a weaning period, and the
Speaker 1: authors point out that all of this is far more
Speaker 1: in line with mammalion and avi and parental care than
Speaker 1: anything we see in in other fish. So it's a
Speaker 1: it's a rather curious example of you know, it's not milk,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's a little more like the Sicilian example.
Speaker 1: And then we're dealing with an out a layer of
Speaker 1: the creature's skin. Um, but but still it's it's providing
Speaker 1: sustenance for the young, and doing so again not in
Speaker 1: just an off head man or like the hatchlings are
Speaker 1: out and then they just you know, grab a bite
Speaker 1: and run off. It seems like we're steadily progressing further
Speaker 1: and further from mammals, Like we went to birds and dinosaurs,
Speaker 1: and we went to amphibians, and then we went to fish,
Speaker 1: which are still vertebrates. How much further could we get? Yeah,
Speaker 1: because it's one of those things where if you just
Speaker 1: came up to somebody in the street and just surprised
Speaker 1: him and said, hey, have you ever tried bird milk?
Speaker 1: They might be like, oh, I don't know. It might
Speaker 1: take them just a few seconds to be like, hey,
Speaker 1: wait a second. Only mammals produced milk. But when you
Speaker 1: start talking about fish milk, and and you know, little
Speaker 1: or insect milk. I think most people aren't gonna buy
Speaker 1: it for a second. They're they're gonna say, you're a
Speaker 1: crazy person. Stop talking about things that don't exist. Let
Speaker 1: me talk about things that do exist. Robert, go on
Speaker 1: a mental journey with me. Imagine you are sitting on
Speaker 1: a park bench in a park somewhere in southern China,
Speaker 1: and you feel a tickle on your forearm. You look down.
Speaker 1: There's an ant crawling on you. It has a shiny,
Speaker 1: segmented black body with antennae wiggling in the breeze. But
Speaker 1: then you look closer, those aren't antenna They're not coming
Speaker 1: out of the top of its head. They're coming out
Speaker 1: of the thorax under the head, or the cephalothorax their legs,
Speaker 1: which means this animal has not six, but eight legs.
Speaker 1: This is not an ant. It is a spider. It's
Speaker 1: a spider in disguise. This is the spider Toxas Magnus.
Speaker 1: I've included a picture for you to look at here, Robert,
Speaker 1: and I like the way, even in this close up,
Speaker 1: the shiny black body is like catching a fluorescent light
Speaker 1: on the ceiling that you can see very clearly. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it looks very much like an ant. At first glance,
Speaker 1: you would just assume this is an aunt. You really
Speaker 1: have to stare at it for a second to to
Speaker 1: make out all the legs. Yeah. So it's about a
Speaker 1: centimeter long, Toxais magnus and it's a member of the
Speaker 1: family selticitay the jumping spiders. Magnus is also known as
Speaker 1: the black ant mimicking jumper which needs to catch your
Speaker 1: name and uh. It's found mostly in Southeast Asia. Now,
Speaker 1: there are hundreds of species of spider that are professional
Speaker 1: ant mimics like this. They're known as the Mermaica morphs
Speaker 1: and not. They not only look like ants, but they
Speaker 1: often mimic the behaviors and movement patterns of ants, even
Speaker 1: lifting and waving their front legs around to make them
Speaker 1: look like antennae, or walking on people, or walking in
Speaker 1: patterns that copy the locomotion of foraging ants. And you
Speaker 1: can imagine several recent spiders might want to look like ants.
Speaker 1: Uh that the main pressure actually driving this evolutionary path
Speaker 1: seems to be the avoidance of certain egg sac parasites
Speaker 1: like spider wasps and predators like antises and other larger
Speaker 1: jumping spiders which kill spiders but usually leave ants alone.
Speaker 1: That makes sense, right, I mean, because of course, obviously
Speaker 1: you know all these species that have evolved to prey
Speaker 1: upon spiders, but associating yourself with the ants, it's kind of, ah,
Speaker 1: that's a safer bet because the ants have strengthened numbers
Speaker 1: and they're not the solitary prey that a spider would be, right,
Speaker 1: or they might just not be nutritious to eat or something.
Speaker 1: I mean, there might be all kinds of reasons that
Speaker 1: a predator doesn't really want to go mess with an aunt.
Speaker 1: So just a few weeks ago, a group of researchers,
Speaker 1: mostly based in China, led by a researcher named John
Speaker 1: chi Chen, published a study in the journal Science revealing
Speaker 1: something amazing about these ant mimic spiders. It started with
Speaker 1: the observation that after the young Magnus spiders hatch from
Speaker 1: their eggs, they sort of became, uh like what you
Speaker 1: might call indoor children. Instead of leaving the nest, they
Speaker 1: hung around for a long time time, roughly twenty days.
Speaker 1: And then it gets weirder because not only did they
Speaker 1: not leave the nest to forage, the mother spider didn't
Speaker 1: leave the nest to forage either, so it couldn't have
Speaker 1: been going out to get food to bring back to them.
Speaker 1: Nobody left home or even went out to the grocery
Speaker 1: store for almost three weeks, and if you know something
Speaker 1: about spiders, you'll probably recognize that there's something odd going
Speaker 1: on here. Like there are some social species of arachnid,
Speaker 1: but this shouldn't be one of the Most spiders, including
Speaker 1: generally salt aids. The jumping spiders are aggressive and even
Speaker 1: even cannibalistic toward one another, so they don't nest together
Speaker 1: like this except for those those small number of social species.
Speaker 1: What's weirder During this period of family time, the young
Speaker 1: spiders grew a lot. If they were growing, they had
Speaker 1: to be eating, so what were they eating If nobody
Speaker 1: ever left the nest. You can probably guess where we're
Speaker 1: going with this. The authors started watching more closely just
Speaker 1: what was happening in the nest, and what they found
Speaker 1: was strange and fascinating. During the first week after hatching,
Speaker 1: the mother spider would secrete droplets of an unknown white
Speaker 1: milk like fluid from a ridge on her underbelly called
Speaker 1: the epigastric furrow. This is also where the spiders eggs
Speaker 1: are produced. Interestingly and uh so, after she secreted this fluid,
Speaker 1: she would leave droplets of it on the walls of
Speaker 1: the nest for her offspring to eat, and after the
Speaker 1: first week, the young spiders would just climb right up
Speaker 1: on her and drink the secretions directly from the mother
Speaker 1: Magnus's epigastric furrow. So this milk substance feeding took place
Speaker 1: for the first forty days of the young spiders lives.
Speaker 1: Even after the young spiders finally started leaving the nest
Speaker 1: to hunt, they would come back. They would come back
Speaker 1: to the nest and supplement their insect diet by getting
Speaker 1: more spider milk from the mother. That's incredible. Yeah, So
Speaker 1: the researchers also found that when the spiders were unable
Speaker 1: to feed their young with this spider milk, all the
Speaker 1: young spiders died thin less than two weeks. So it's
Speaker 1: not just a little something extra, it's necessary for the
Speaker 1: life cycle of the species. And the spider milk they
Speaker 1: found is incredibly nutritious. They found that per mill leader
Speaker 1: it contained two milligrams of sugar, five point two milligrams
Speaker 1: of fat, and a hundred and twenty four milligrams of protein,
Speaker 1: which is a lot that's expressed as four times the
Speaker 1: protein content of cow's milk. And of course I envisioned
Speaker 1: an awesome future whenever we finally chuck it in and
Speaker 1: just start hawking bogus nutrition supplements to bodybuilders, We're going
Speaker 1: to do the spider milk protein bomb stack. I love this.
Speaker 1: I really want to incorporate this into Dungeons and Dragons
Speaker 1: because you have various species, particularly in an under dark um,
Speaker 1: the vast subterranean realm in the setting that depends on spiders.
Speaker 1: The gray dwarf of the Dugard. They have these kind
Speaker 1: of like a pack pony spiders that they use, so
Speaker 1: it makes sense that they would be drinking some sort
Speaker 1: of spider milk. And now there's a there's a scientific
Speaker 1: reason to incorporate that into everyone's campaigns. Doesn't science always
Speaker 1: end up proving the D and D monster manual correct.
Speaker 1: One of the co authors on this paper, Richard T. Courtlet, says, quote,
Speaker 1: our findings suggests that lactation may arise in non mammals
Speaker 1: when it provides a significant advantage in offspring survival. Well,
Speaker 1: as we've been seeing from the other examples in this
Speaker 1: episode that's clearly true. Uh. He also says that it's
Speaker 1: useful in this species because of the small size of
Speaker 1: the hatchlings. They're tiny and unable to hunt, or at
Speaker 1: least initially unable to hunt or defend themselves from predators.
Speaker 1: But ultimately the researchers don't know why this strange mammal
Speaker 1: like trade has evolved in this one species of spider.
Speaker 1: As far as we know, at least so far, this
Speaker 1: is the only spider that does this, and it's very weird.
Speaker 1: And another thing that was pointed out that was pretty
Speaker 1: weird is that the mother magnus didn't just offer her
Speaker 1: milk to the young. She also displays like social parenting behaviors,
Speaker 1: like maintaining a clean and safe nest environment for the
Speaker 1: young to hang out in. Just kind of kind of
Speaker 1: weird for spiders. All Right, on that note, we're going
Speaker 1: to take another break, and when we come back, you know,
Speaker 1: we'll we'll keep having some arachneid milk. Thank Alright, we're back, Robert.
Speaker 1: Are you going to feed me with the milk of arachneids? Yes? Yes,
Speaker 1: we have another another arachneid species here that's producing something
Speaker 1: that's kind of like milk. So we're talking about the
Speaker 1: pseudo scorpion. Nice. Now, the pseudo scorpion really sounds like
Speaker 1: something that your hey, Luis Borees would have just made up.
Speaker 1: It's a tiny arachneid that can frequently be found living
Speaker 1: in old books, protecting them from decay by feasting on
Speaker 1: book lice that munch on the starch based book binding glue.
Speaker 1: That is that is good? Yeah, I mean it really
Speaker 1: does sound like something that Borees would have made up, like, oh, well,
Speaker 1: the the old books are home to these tiny creatures
Speaker 1: and they eat other tiny creatures that they want to
Speaker 1: destroy the books. I don't know it did, There's there's
Speaker 1: something beautiful about it. Yeah, it's like something that would
Speaker 1: have been imagined in the marginal illustrations in one of
Speaker 1: the scripts in the Name of the Rows. Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: and and and they do literally live in the margins,
Speaker 1: so it makes sense. But if you see them, they
Speaker 1: look kind of like scorpions without tails, like they got claws. Yea.
Speaker 1: They're sometimes called false scorpions because they are in fact
Speaker 1: not scorpions despite having these big pinchers. They have some
Speaker 1: really impressive looking pinchers. And there are some thirty three
Speaker 1: hundred species of false scorpion that live around the world,
Speaker 1: but the most famous is callith can crow Eades, which
Speaker 1: can reach four millimeters in length. So I was reading
Speaker 1: about this. The author bet Crew has a wonderful post
Speaker 1: about them on the Scientific American blog titled how book
Speaker 1: scorpions Tend to Your Dusty Tones, and she discusses, among
Speaker 1: other things, they're they're dancing and rubbing mating rituals, which
Speaker 1: sound quite cute, but then it gets really kind of
Speaker 1: weird and brutal. Quote he dumps a sack full of
Speaker 1: sperm on the round, and it gets worse because then
Speaker 1: he pushes the female down into his sack full of
Speaker 1: sperm on the ground. This whole process can take anywhere
Speaker 1: from ten minutes to a whole hour. The sack full
Speaker 1: of sperm will be taken in by the female's genital
Speaker 1: orifice and she'll end up producing twenty to forty eggs,
Speaker 1: which she'll carry around in her abdomen even after they've hatched.
Speaker 1: Well that's weird sex, yes, yeah, so everything gets a
Speaker 1: little less borhe than a little more. I don't know, geeker,
Speaker 1: I guess, but but here's where we get to the
Speaker 1: sweet book scorpion milk. So the larvae will hang around
Speaker 1: and the young, the young book scorpions will even hang
Speaker 1: out around on her back until they're old enough to
Speaker 1: go off on their own. But as larvae, they remain
Speaker 1: inside for a while, living in her genital orifice and
Speaker 1: feeding on a milk like substance that secretes from her ovaries.
Speaker 1: So they feast on this stuff, and eventually she's just
Speaker 1: so emaciated from the consumption, uh, that the tiny book
Speaker 1: scorpions just have to leave, like they can no longer
Speaker 1: hang out in the orifice because there's just not enough
Speaker 1: book scorpion milk to go around anymore. Ungrateful, Well, you know,
Speaker 1: she does, She does a lot, She does what she can,
Speaker 1: and then they have to move on and eat some
Speaker 1: book lice. Somebody out of whip some independence into those.
Speaker 1: Maybe book scorpions getta eating book lice earlier. Now I
Speaker 1: have another couple of creatures to mention here. These are insects,
Speaker 1: but they also illustrate what's going on. So bat flies.
Speaker 1: I was not familiar with bat flies, but they are
Speaker 1: fascinating little creatures. They are as the name implies, parasites
Speaker 1: that feed on bats. They do, not, however, look much
Speaker 1: like a traditional fly whatever you're imagining when I say
Speaker 1: bat fly, it ain't that. Are we going to try
Speaker 1: to say? The family name of the bat flies? Is
Speaker 1: it nick ter Ribida? Yes? I think that would be
Speaker 1: my guess, nick to Ribidae. Uh. They are wingless, spider
Speaker 1: like insects with long legs and a small head that
Speaker 1: folds back into a groove in the thorax when it rests.
Speaker 1: So earlier we had a spider that kind of looks
Speaker 1: like an insect. Here we have an insect that kind
Speaker 1: of looks like a spider. They also have a highly
Speaker 1: developed uterus and milk glands there, or at least they
Speaker 1: were referred to as milk glands milk in quotation marks here.
Speaker 1: And these glands seem to play a key role in
Speaker 1: imparting important bacterial indo symbians to the offspring and other
Speaker 1: insects engage in this kind of behavior as well, as
Speaker 1: they host bacteria in their cells that provide important boosts
Speaker 1: that food alone cannot give them. These indo symbians are essential.
Speaker 1: For example, the tetse fly hosts a bacterium that provides
Speaker 1: b items that are not available in uh in the
Speaker 1: flies normal diet of blood. Isn't it amazing? How Like
Speaker 1: we think that animals rule the world, but like almost
Speaker 1: all animals are just so dependent on invisible microbes in
Speaker 1: order to even just get the basic nutrition they need
Speaker 1: out of their food. Yeah, it's it's crazy, it's crazy.
Speaker 1: But yeah, again, this is a great example all of
Speaker 1: just like, it's almost like a simple model of milk. Hey, baby,
Speaker 1: you're just gonna only eat blood, but there are things
Speaker 1: you need. I will have to provide them through some
Speaker 1: handy secretions. Well, there's another insects secretion. I want to
Speaker 1: talk about. What kind of yummy milk do you have
Speaker 1: for us? Now? It's cockroach milk. So you're not a
Speaker 1: fan of cockroaches, are you? How do you know anyone
Speaker 1: who is? Oh, I'm sure there are lots of people
Speaker 1: who love cockroach. I mean, he'sing cockroaches are kind of
Speaker 1: I think cockroaches are only interesting if they are exotic
Speaker 1: or their pets. Nobody wants just free range cockroaches or
Speaker 1: palmetta bugs. Is you know we regionally call the larger
Speaker 1: ones that invade our homes. Nobody wants those around though,
Speaker 1: like that. We have just an inescapable around here, inescapable,
Speaker 1: and I feel like we have instant kill instinct with them.
Speaker 1: No matter how much you have to you have to
Speaker 1: be pretty hardycore animal lover to say, oh, the Palmetta
Speaker 1: bug is here, let me attend to its needs. And
Speaker 1: smashing one of those Georgia cockroaches is basic, really like
Speaker 1: smashing like a three foot wide jellyfish, Like it leaves
Speaker 1: this explosion of of mucus and liquid everywhere. They are
Speaker 1: so big and so juicy. Yeah, and they'll they like
Speaker 1: to hang out I've noticed sometimes tauntingly on white walls.
Speaker 1: We're like, oh, I can't squish you there, because there
Speaker 1: will be a The mark will haunt me forever. You
Speaker 1: ever walk into the bathroom in the middle of the night,
Speaker 1: turn the light on and there's a cockroach on your toothbrush.
Speaker 1: No I haven't, I haven't. It's happened to me. I
Speaker 1: have not encountered that, But now I have that that
Speaker 1: image of man, and now I will fear it. I
Speaker 1: do frequently, never know, I do frequently notice how you'll
Speaker 1: I'll go into a room. It might be the you know,
Speaker 1: the kitchen or wherever, and you turn on the light
Speaker 1: and it's not. You don't always necessarily see the roach
Speaker 1: all at once, but suddenly something clicks in your mind,
Speaker 1: like there's something something is off, like you know, and
Speaker 1: then you have to look for it, and then you
Speaker 1: find it, you know. But we we say we have
Speaker 1: like a high level of awareness for them. So there
Speaker 1: is a species of cockroach found in Asia and in
Speaker 1: the Pacific Islands. I think it's found a lot in Hawaii,
Speaker 1: known as the Pacific beetle cockroach or diploped Tera punk tata.
Speaker 1: And there are several interesting things about the species of cockroach.
Speaker 1: First of all, they are the only known truly viviparous cockroach,
Speaker 1: the only cockroach we know of that has real live
Speaker 1: birth instead of laying eggs. Second, this kind of interesting.
Speaker 1: They do chemical warfare. They produce an organic compound that's
Speaker 1: known as quine owns from specialized tracheal glands, and this
Speaker 1: is probably a chemical weapon they use against predators. There
Speaker 1: are analogies for this, like quine owns are used as
Speaker 1: part of the chemical defense of the Bombardier beetle. And
Speaker 1: then finally, researchers have discovered that this cockroach who gives
Speaker 1: live birth to its young also secretes a type of
Speaker 1: protein rich, light yellow milk like liquid from her brew sack,
Speaker 1: and then the young ones drink it. Okay, tell me
Speaker 1: more about this roach not well. One of the one
Speaker 1: of the researchers who first discovered this was the University
Speaker 1: of Iowa emeritus biologist and insects surgeon, Dr. Barbara Stay,
Speaker 1: insects surgeon. How do you become an insect surgeon? That
Speaker 1: sounds like an awesome job, very delicate hands. Yes, you've
Speaker 1: gotta be like so many steps above, like the human neurosurgeon,
Speaker 1: to be an insect surgeon. So the cockroach milk begins
Speaker 1: as a liquid at first, and it contains these milk
Speaker 1: crystals that are full of nutritious proteins and stuff. And
Speaker 1: then as the young grow, the the milk begins to
Speaker 1: sort of like solidify into bigger solid crystals. And Dr
Speaker 1: Stay apparently developed a process for quote milking these cockroaches.
Speaker 1: Speaking to NPR, she described the process. I guess pretty simply,
Speaker 1: she said, quote you substitute a filter paper in the
Speaker 1: brood sack for the embryos, and you leave it there.
Speaker 1: After a while, you take it out and you get
Speaker 1: the milk. Okay, it's kind of a stuff of washcloth
Speaker 1: into the roach and then eventually you take it out
Speaker 1: and ring it in, ring it out. That's yeah, that's
Speaker 1: about right. So you may have seen some articles about
Speaker 1: this a couple of years ago because there was a
Speaker 1: new study in analyzing the contents of this cockroach milk,
Speaker 1: and this study was done by a team led by
Speaker 1: the Indian biochemists Supermannion Ramaswamy, and the researchers found that
Speaker 1: it was super nutritious. Quote, a single crystal is estimated
Speaker 1: to contain more than three times the energy of an
Speaker 1: equivalent mass of dairy milk. This unique storage form of
Speaker 1: nourishment for developing embryos allows access to a constant supply
Speaker 1: of complete nutrients. And by the way, of course, the
Speaker 1: way this was covered in the press was there was
Speaker 1: just headline after headline and CNN and everywhere saying the
Speaker 1: cockroach milk is the next super food. I'm I'm not
Speaker 1: grossed out by that. I was as grossed out as
Speaker 1: I am by by roaches us. Really, um, I think
Speaker 1: that falls in line with a lot of what we've
Speaker 1: been seeing about the consumption of insects, and sects is
Speaker 1: the protein source. The future is going to be a
Speaker 1: place where either you eat the bugs or the bugs
Speaker 1: eat you. Into ma Fiji is the future, and I
Speaker 1: think there's no doubt about that. I mean, it is
Speaker 1: a healthy source of protein. That's I think going to
Speaker 1: be an incredibly important meat substitute in in on future Earth.
Speaker 1: I have to give a quick shout out to the
Speaker 1: Audubon Society's UH Insectarium in New Orleans. UH wonderful museum
Speaker 1: with so many different live insects species and some arachnet
Speaker 1: species to check out. But they also have an area
Speaker 1: where every time you go you get to try a
Speaker 1: few different um food items that have been prepared with
Speaker 1: insect protein. And did you try, Oh, I do it
Speaker 1: every time. Did you like it? Yeah? Well, they really
Speaker 1: try and make sure that it's something that you will
Speaker 1: and candy, you know, so it's generally something sweet you
Speaker 1: know that kids are gonna be into, essentially, you know,
Speaker 1: cookies topped with meal worms, that sort of a thing.
Speaker 1: But it's very I think it's very instructional and insightful
Speaker 1: and I'm I'm super glad that they do that and
Speaker 1: provide that kind of uh, you know, educational content in
Speaker 1: addition to just learning about these different insect interactant species.
Speaker 1: I didn't write down what the reference for this was,
Speaker 1: but I did look at a press release about a
Speaker 1: study that found that if you wanted to get people,
Speaker 1: I think what it was was, if you wanted to
Speaker 1: get people to agree to eating insects, you couldn't just
Speaker 1: appeal to the idea that it was better for the
Speaker 1: environment or that it was nutritious. You had to convince
Speaker 1: them that it was a delicious delicacy and if you
Speaker 1: could do that, they would eat the insects. Interesting. I, yeah,
Speaker 1: I would love to look at this topic more and
Speaker 1: see what what people were doing along those lines, because
Speaker 1: we often come back to the fact that, like, what's
Speaker 1: the difference ultimately between eating various types of insects in
Speaker 1: eating shrimp or crawl dads or what happened? Yeah, lobster lobster?
Speaker 1: Why is that different? Yeah? So, yeah, I would love
Speaker 1: to talk about about insects more in the future. But
Speaker 1: I've got en off topic here. Let's get back to
Speaker 1: that delicious roach knock Well, So I brought that up
Speaker 1: just to say that it's probably not true that cockroach
Speaker 1: milk is the next superfood. I think those were just
Speaker 1: some headline grabbers. Uh. Number one, we don't know that
Speaker 1: the milk is safe for human consumption. Humans can often
Speaker 1: become allergic to cockroaches. We don't have a way of
Speaker 1: milking them at any kind of volume. So it is
Speaker 1: really interesting research. Nonetheless though a couple of reasons, but
Speaker 1: generally it has to do with the idea of studying
Speaker 1: the proteins in these crystals in the roach milk to
Speaker 1: see if they can be replicated in other production scenarios,
Speaker 1: say by e coal i or by yeast, in ways
Speaker 1: that could deliver better technologies for medicine or nutrition. And
Speaker 1: I was reading an interesting blog post by a biologist
Speaker 1: or entomologist named Joe Ballinger, and in this post he
Speaker 1: pointed out that the real discovery here was that there's
Speaker 1: this protein structure in the in the cockroach milk that
Speaker 1: includes a protein that kind of serves as a delivery
Speaker 1: pocket that could be used in other context to shuttle
Speaker 1: drugs or substances around inside the body. And of course
Speaker 1: that's relevant anytime you've got some kind of delivery or
Speaker 1: micro delivery system that's relevant to future medicines. As for taste,
Speaker 1: on the other hand, reportedly one of Ramaswami's colleagues tried
Speaker 1: the cockroach milk on a dare I think maybe because
Speaker 1: he lost a drinking game or something, and quote he said,
Speaker 1: it doesn't taste like anything special. Well, I wonder how
Speaker 1: much you drank though, Like essentially, if he just its
Speaker 1: like a you know, he dabbed a tiny droplet of it,
Speaker 1: or if he had like a full milk glass of
Speaker 1: the stuff, like you drank a quart of it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I imagine he just came from a million cockroaches, the
Speaker 1: milk of a million cockroaches. It does sound lovely, doesn't it.
Speaker 1: Well that's it for our sampling of non mammalian milks
Speaker 1: to discuss here. You know, we didn't even get into
Speaker 1: some of the fictional milks out there that have been consumed.
Speaker 1: How about those creatures in the most recent Star Wars films. Oh,
Speaker 1: in the Last Jedi or Skywalkers drinking? Is it green
Speaker 1: or is it blue? Milk? That comes? Yeah? Oh, that
Speaker 1: that's like the best scene. I loved that. It kind
Speaker 1: of made the movie for me. Yeah, I enjoyed that film.
Speaker 1: I did too. Um. You know another one that comes up.
Speaker 1: It's been a long time since I've seen this, but
Speaker 1: the David Cronenberg adaptation of William Burrows Naked Lunch. I
Speaker 1: believe the mud wump creatures in that film UH secreted
Speaker 1: some sort of substance that was consumed by by various characters.
Speaker 1: It's been a while since I've seen it. I don't
Speaker 1: exactly remember what the whole deal was there, I must
Speaker 1: confess I've never seen it. Oh, it's it's interesting and
Speaker 1: the book is a classic of its generation. But off hand,
Speaker 1: I can't think of any other you know, key like
Speaker 1: alien milks or monster milks and UH in cinema or fiction. Though,
Speaker 1: this would be a good thing to to call out
Speaker 1: to our our listeners about what what are some of
Speaker 1: your your favorite or at least notable examples of of
Speaker 1: non mammalian UH, you know, a fictional creature milks out there?
Speaker 1: And indeed, I want to know what dinosaur milks other
Speaker 1: people would like to consume. Now, as I said earlier
Speaker 1: in this episode, while I've really enjoyed exploring this anomalous
Speaker 1: non mammalian milk, we could probably do a whole show
Speaker 1: in the future just on the magic of true milk.
Speaker 1: Of mammal milk. It is a fascinating subject and there's
Speaker 1: a lot we didn't even have time to talk about today. Likewise,
Speaker 1: I would love to do an episode that goes more
Speaker 1: in death on cockroaches. I mean there there's a whole
Speaker 1: lot there that we didn't even touch on here today,
Speaker 1: or squash beneath our boot they're six legged saints? All right? Well, um,
Speaker 1: uh we thank you for listening to this episode within
Speaker 1: which we discussed the milk of the six legged Saint,
Speaker 1: and uh we hope you'll tune in some more. We
Speaker 1: have a couple of other holiday episodes coming up, but
Speaker 1: more than I more than I expected. But I think
Speaker 1: I'm I'm embracing the holidays a little more this year.
Speaker 1: You've been leaning in. I have people out there. You're
Speaker 1: gonna be surprised all the stuff Bert has wanted to
Speaker 1: talk about this month. I'm I think I'm giving in
Speaker 1: to the holidays this year. I finally realized that it's
Speaker 1: not it's not courage to fight it, it's courage to
Speaker 1: to give in. Uh. To paraphrase a quote from one
Speaker 1: of my favorite holiday films, Ravenous. Uh, so hey, if
Speaker 1: you want to uh listen to other episodes of Stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow Your Mind or keep an eye out for
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Speaker 1: us out big. Thanks as always to are super awesome
Speaker 1: audio producers Alex Williams and Tori Harrison. If you would
Speaker 1: like to get in touch with us with feedback about
Speaker 1: this episode or any other, or would like to suggest
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