Disgusting Milk Made

Giant Being Devoured by Cthulhu?

(Enceladus devoured by Milky Way-like galaxy)

René van der Woude

Natalie Angier has noticed that "Everywhere in the Animal Kingdom, [There are] Followers of the Milky Way" (NYT, February 11, 2019), which may suggest to some ears the arrival of a cosmic religion after the Lovecraftian fashion of "The Call of Cthulhu," but which is actually a thing far worse. Have you perchance taken a look at how scientists are increasingly poking their noses into invariably noisome stuff? Take a glance and wince at what scientists have managed to dredge up in their research:

The newborn tsetse fly looks like a hand grenade and moves like a Slinky, and if you squeeze it too hard the source of its plumpness becomes clear — or rather a telltale white. The larva, it seems, is just a big bag of milk. "Rupture the gut, and the milk comes spilling out" . . . . And milk it truly is - a nutritional, biochemical and immunological designer fluid that the mother fly's body has spun from her blood meals and pumped into her uterus, where her developing young greedily gulped it down . . . . The new tsetse fly research is just one example of scientists widening the ranks of adherents to nature's Milky Way. Researchers lately have found the equivalent of mother's milk in an array of unexpected, breast-free places: in spiders, cockroaches and burying beetles.

Spiders!? Cockroaches!? Burying beetles!? Not to mention the already mentioned titty . . . titsie . . . tsetse fly! And the somehow uncannily disgusting image of that fly's ruptured gut spilling forth milk.

Why, this practically goes against nature!