"I have some in a tank."

“Oh, brilliant!”

"I'm doing horrible experiments on them, of course, but there's a control group."

“…What sort of horrible experiments…?”

"Remember when I said it's not clear if all kinds of mals can starve? I'm trying that, I'm trying poisoning them and sometimes staking out a poisoned one for another mal to eat overnight, I'm trying sticking various forms of birth control to 'em to see if that makes them reproduce slower or not at all."

“Oh, lovely!” Horrible experiments for a good cause. Delicious.

"Yeah. - if you do want to hand out birth control actually I'm a little short on materials for it, I can often get a morning after pill or a condom from somebody as they come in that their parents insisted on and they'd rather have a bag of snack tokens, and sometimes a lab accident will leave somebody's implant behind, but it's slow going."

Kareen hands her an opaque plastic baggie full of miscellaneous pills and prophylactics.

"Thanks!"

“You’re welcome! See any results yet?”

"Some poison works on them and some doesn't, no agglos have starved to death since I've had them but they do act differently - mostly trying a lot harder to escape and kind of picking at each others' carapaces - and BC tentatively reduces the size of the next generation though not to zero."

“What poison works? No, wait, don’t tell me. Do tell me what kinds you’ve tried, though, and I’ll see what I can do about applying those toxins to mals in the gym tonight.”

"Well, some of them might work on agglos and not other mals, but I can dig up my list after dinner, I don't have it on me."

“And it’s possible some work on some subset of other mals, but not agglos! It’s important not to bias yourself before an experiment.”

"Yup. I don't have samples of every poison I used to lend you, alas."

“It’s alright, I figure it most likely counts as a material.”

"Some of 'em were potions."

“Ah. Well, I’m sure there will be additional chances to experiment.”

"That's the hope. There's, like, entire agglo farms for experimenting on, out in the world, but I didn't know if I'd - be able to wait."

“And agglo farms won’t tell you anything about where they’re different from other mals.”

"Yeah. There are other mals people can keep, but trying to starve them is traditionally how they get loose and eat you and go on a rampage."

“Do people starve them for non-experimental reasons?”

"Quattrias are useful for combining certain alchemical substances by feeding each of their heads a different one and you don't want to also get kibble in there."

“Can you not just feed them lots and lots of—no, not if the original substances have any scarcity. Well. I suppose wizards can die of their own stupidity too.”

"Oh yes, absolutely."