Cockroach Milk Proteins Churn Out an Ig Nobel Win

It’s that time of year again to celebrate the science “that first [makes] people laugh, and then [makes] them think.” On September 3, 2026, the 36^th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony—in a break from tradition—took place across the pond in Switzerland and doled out 10 new awards.

While this year’s theme was “fungi,” the Ig Nobel Chemistry Prize honored milk. Milk fuels growing babies, pairs perfectly with a bowl of cereal, and can soften the bitter edge of a morning cup of coffee. Whether it comes from a cow, a human, or a plant-based source, milk is a familiar part of everyday life. But milk can also come from a far less conventional place: a cockroach.

The award honored an international group of researchers who discovered that milk proteins from Diploptera punctata, the Pacific beetle cockroach, have more than three times as much energy as milk proteins from cows.¹ D. punctata, in particular, is one of the few cockroach species that produces a nutritionally dense, crystalline “milk” to feed their live-born young.

This liquid milk is secreted within the mother’s brood sac—the insect version of a uterus—where it is consumed by the embryos. From there, the consumed liquid becomes concentrated inside the embryos’ guts to form tiny crystals.

Because it is more difficult to ascertain the X-ray crystal structure from in vivo-grown crystals, mainly due to their small size, the researchers studied the relatively large protein crystals isolated from the midgut of developing D. punctata embryos. Through additional testing, they observed that these proteins were heterogeneous in weight and content, with respect to protein, carbohydrate, and lipid composition. These findings suggest that in this crystalline form, the proteins can store complete nutrients to varying degrees for developing embryos.

When the researchers compared the energy content of the milk crystals with that of cow’s milk, they found that a single cockroach milk crystal can contain more than three times the energy of an equivalent amount of dairy milk. Notably, the findings suggest that this crystalline milk provides cockroach offspring with a steady, nutrient-rich food source, helping them grow into big, strong, full-fledged cockroaches.