hello again everyone- this week we have a bug fact!
caterpillars…. they eat and eat and eat until they are ready to build a cocoon/chrysalis… then they magically come out as a moth or butterfly! but what happens inside that cocoon you may be wondering??? well! It turns out they don’t stop being hungry in their cocoon…. they digest themselves (!!!) until they COMPLETELY liquefy. so they dissolve themselves into primordial goo… then… reform as a flying beauty. (perhaps the strangest way to experience puberty) what makes this particularly amazing to me though, is that they retain their memories during this process! where, in their liquefied selves, do their memories get stored?? and do they remember their time as caterpillar soup, too? is it weird to digest yourself? does it hurt? feel good?
the video below shows 3-d scans of the chrysalis formation- it’s pretty cool to see! (also, it’s worth noting.. caterpillars spin a cocoon when they are going to become a moth and harden into a chrysalis when they will become a butterfly).
unrelated but i have a sweet caterpillar story. so my dad is the family handyman- he spends his days landscaping, fixing anything/everything, painting, and so on. he spent the other day painting some plywood he just installed at a family friend’s house. after he finished up, he drove over to the hardware store to pick up some supplies he would need the next day, cruised over to tommy burger to get fav snack, came home and munched. now, tommy burgers are exceptionally greasy, so after he ate he was washing his hands in the sink, looked up, and saw a monarch caterpillar standing up on his shoulders. i imagine they stared at each other awhile, perhaps the caterpillar was cursing at him for not sharing any french fries or introducing him to the staff at the hardware store. my dad, who literally would not harm a fly, knew he had to find this lil dude a new home. now, monarch caterpillars like to feast on milkweed (a fact we learned last year, when my dad found one stranded on our driveway & wanted to rehabilitate it (apparently he & caterpillars have a way of finding each other)) but we don’t have milkweed in our yard. soooo my dad drove back to our friend’s house and deposited the caterpillar where it had hitched onto him- the milkweed! so cute.
