Oh, hey, it's the convo you're overhearing at a cafe, and this is ologies. I'm Allie Ward. I'm so proud of you. Here you are. Maybe after this week's main episode to hear a bonus episode about cockroach milk, about which I'm actually very passionate. So let me set the stage. So for a few years, The Tonight Show was asking if I'd want to do a bug segment for them, and I kept chickening out. And then in May of this year, I went on the show. I showed Salma Hayek some beetle larva and scorpions and this bird-eating tarantula. I put a cat-eye praying mantis on Jimmy Fallon's face. No, out looking. No, there you go.

She wants to go to you. She wants to go to you. She doesn't want to go with him. You did you see? Being very confident about this. Oh, yeah. Look at you, Samma. Like her. Yeah, you made a new friend. This is nice. We'll link the segment in the show notes. but what you did not see was me eating the milk of a cockroach. This is because of fate and sorrow, but it's also because of a guy on set known as Safety

Steve.

And last minute, my little vials of frozen cockroach milk were given like this tragic

cabash after months and months of working with a lab to milk cockroaches. I am getting ahead of myself because what do you mean cockroaches make milk? I'm sure you are wondering that. We're going to dive into a vat of it in a minute. But first, thank you so much to patrons of the show who support for as little as a dollar a month. Thank you to everyone out there in Ologiesmerch from Ologiesmerch.com. And thank you to everyone who leaves reviews for the show, which I earnestly read and they help us so much. And to prove it, I read one recent one, like this one from Paragrindus, who left a review saying everything in the whole wide world is riveting, soul saving for our times.

Thank you, Paragrindus. I don't know how to say your name, but I like your review. Also,

Hey, Fiona. So let's get into this episode. So in 2017, I saw an article about cockroach milk in the news.

It was all over the news. One NPR piece proclaimed it the most nutritious substance on earth, three times that of

buffalo milk. And I have thought about this substance like roughly daily ever since. And I have

told anyone who will listen about it, now including you. And so when it came time to trying to line up

some bug facts for the tonight show, I tracked down

this one researcher, Dr. Emily Jennings, asking about obtaining some of this substance for like

the TV taste test. As it turns out, Dr. Jennings no longer worked in the cockroach milk industry,

but was familiar with the podcast and wrote me back, Hi, Allie. I'm hoping this is real and not a scam.

Who is out there

scamming people for cockroach milk, though? Ha-ha. So Dr. Jennings put me in touch with two research

colleagues, whom you are about to meet. Now, one pioneer of the research you won't meet was Dr. Barbara

Stray of the University of Iowa, and she unfortunately passed into the next realm last year at the age of 97.

But her work continues at a few labs across the world, including at the University of Cincinnati

and the University of Bristol. So we chatted with two researchers who work with this one species,

Diploptera, punctata, the Pacific beetle roach, which can be found if you're looking for them in the

forests of Australia and Myanmar and Indian, Fiji, China, Hawaii.

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