Plan B Forum

rubato wrote:I usu carve a few butternut squash fro a "Shmoo " tableau for Halloween.

yrs,
rubato

Guinevere wrote:Again, if you have to explain a joke, it isn't one.

The Pacific beetle cockroach, which is native to Hawaii, gives birth to live young.

Pour out that almond milk — the new hip thing cockroach milk.

Well, kind of.

The female Pacific beetle cockroach is one of a kind. Unlike other insect species, this Hawaiian native gives birth to live young. And she feeds them a pale, yellow liquid "milk" from her brood sack.

The nutrient-rich milk crystals of the Pacific beetle cockroach are prettier than they sound.

But the craziest thing: Cut open an embryonic beetle roach, and they're guts will spill out nutrient-rich milk crystals that shimmer like glitter.

"I discovered that these little embryos at a certain development were able to drink," recalls Barbara Stay, a professor emerita at the University of Iowa who was among the first to study the insect's crystalline milk. "What they were drinking was a liquid substance," she explains — but further along in the embryos' development, the liquid from their mother concentrated inside their guts to form tiny crystals.

Stay also found that she could extract the roach milk — in either liquid or crystal form — through a process she calls "milking a cockroach."

"You substitute a filter paper in the brood sac for the embryos and you leave it there," she explains. After a while, "you take it out and you get the milk."

Cockroach milk, anyone?

Orson Welles once called her the "most exciting woman in the world