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  • Hi, this is Emily from MinuteEarth.

  • Supermarkets have lots of milks to choose from these days, many of which are the product

  • of blending up and straining various nuts and seeds.

  • Plain old milk milk, on the other hand, is also a strained product - it's filtered

  • cow blood.

  • As weird as this seems, all mammal milk is, in fact, made from blood, because blood contains

  • lots of nutrients, and baby mammals need lots of sugar, fat, and protein to grow complex

  • brains and bodies.

  • But mammal mammas can't just open an artery; that would be dangerous.

  • Plus, most of the useful nutrients in blood are too dilute and blood has too much iron

  • for most babies to process.

  • This is where the mammary gland comes in: It's full of thousands of tiny sacs whose

  • walls have special cells that grab water and nutrients from passing blood, do some chemistry

  • on them, and pass them to the inside of the sacs where they mix together to become milk.

  • When a baby starts to suckle on the teat, its sucking pattern tells the mom's brain

  • to the hormone release oxytocin, which attaches to the sacs, causing them to squeeze out the

  • tiny droplets of milk into the baby's mouth.

  • Each mammal species tailors its blood-filtering recipe to the needs of its babies.

  • For example, to help their Arctic-dwelling pups pack on the blubber, hooded seal moms

  • produce a milk with 15 times the fat of cow milk.

  • Cottontail moms make high-protein milk for their bunny babies, allowing them to develop

  • their hopping muscles quickly.

  • The tammar wallaby can make two different types of milk in two different teats at the

  • same time - one high in sugars for a newborn in the pouch and one high in fat and protein

  • for her waddler.

  • And while selectively bred modern dairy cows don't have a particularly wacky recipe for

  • their milk, they sure make a lot of it.

  • The current record holder - a Holstein named Aftershock - can produce a bathtub full of

  • milk every day.

  • That's udderly impressive.

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Hi, this is Emily from MinuteEarth.

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