Allie Ward

Okay.

Come on.

It's cool.

You're going to love this.

There you go.

So quick background.

Sinead, whose father worked for the UN, grew up in Zimbabwe, where she said that the insects were top tier, 10 out of 10, she says, except for mosquitoes.

And Josh grew up in Ohio with like a stream in the backyard, plenty of buggy critters, and thought maybe he'd go to med school, but was offered a spot in a research lab looking at cave crickets and skeeters and tsetse flies, which are vectors for this sub-Saharan disease called sleeping sickness.

Now, Sinead still works on tsetse flies, which also make milk and give birth.

to one huge baby.

And they've been working together for about five years on the science of pregnant bugs.

They recently co-authored the paper, Viviparity and Obligate Blood Feeding, Tsetse Flies as a Unique Research System to Study Climate Change.

So let's get on to business because before we chat about the cockroach milk, we got to cover these expecting mamas who are bugs.

Do bugs get pregnant?

What do you call them?

Expecting?

I always hear with reptiles and insects, maybe gravid.

And can you describe the difference between being pregnant and being gravid?

And so this is not all cockroaches that give live birth and make milk inside a brood sack.

Can you tell me a little bit about the specific study species?