And you thought you felt full. Check out this female tsetse fly push out a larva fat with its momma’s milk. From Deep Look:
Mammalian moms aren’t the only ones to deliver babies and feed them milk. Tsetse flies, the insects best known for transmitting sleeping sickness, do it too.
(UC Davis medical entomologist Geoff Attardo) is trying to understand in detail the unusual way in which these flies reproduce in order to find new ways to combat the disease, which has a crippling effect on a huge swath of Africa.
When it’s time to give birth, a female tsetse fly takes less than a minute to push out a squiggly yellowish larva almost as big as itself…
“There’s too much coming out of it to be able to fit inside,” (Attardo) recalled thinking. “The fact that they can do it eight times in their lifetime is kind of amazing to me.”