Orca milk smells dizzyingly fishy. Seal milk has a wealthy orange hue. Reindeer milk, maybe fittingly, is as thick as eggnog. Not that I’m tempted to attempt it, or any of the opposite uncommon milks I can see stacked on cabinets from ground to ceiling. I’ve donned a puffy winter jacket and stepped contained in the freezer that homes the biggest assortment of animal milk on the planet, containing that of all the things from tree shrews to two-toed sloths and big anteaters.

The gathering, housed at Smithsonian’s Nationwide Zoo in Washington DC, is greater than a cupboard of curiosities – it’s a essential useful resource for workers at this zoo and others around the globe tasked with feeding orphaned infants. By finding out all this white – and not-so-white – stuff, Smithsonian scientists can create customized toddler formulation that can give the animals of their care the absolute best begin in life.

As their understanding of milk has improved, nonetheless, they’ve realised that their formulation are lacking an essential element: microbes. Now, as they discover the microbial variety contained in several milks and the advantages these organisms convey, they’re striving to duplicate this in lab-made milk – not solely to higher help younger animals within the zoo, but in addition to help the survival of among the rarest species within the wild.

“The target isn’t essentially to freeze milk, archive it…