Bernd Heinrich about the metamorphosis of caterpillars/butterflies in his cool book Life Everlasting:
A new theory claims that because the metamorphosis from maggot to fly or caterpillar to moth is so radical, with no continuity from one to the next, that the adult forms of these insects are actually new organisms. According to this proposal, sometime in their ancient heritage, when these animals were still aquatic and when all fertilizations were external, they hybridized with another species. They thus harbored a second set of genes, which could, given the right environmental conditions, be activated. In effect, the animal is a chimera, an amalgam of two, where first one lives and dies and then the other emerges.
I realize I haven’t been thinking about cocoons and chrysalises nearly enough recently. When I was 10ish, my mom was raising monarchs and we also had pet rats. My friend Jace and I desperately wanted to get some syringes inject some ratsblood into the precious chrysalis goo. I didn’t want to take it from our rats, but come on people, what does it take to get a little ratsblood around here? I hope scientists are listening out there when I say that as we move forward, more experiments must be done by injecting genetic material and chemicals into chrysalises, or “Nature’s Perfect Test Tubes of Charged Mutagen.” Some mo from Bernd:
When I was a graduate student in the 1960s working with the protozoan Euglena gracilis, it was known that while the nucleus of this protozoan contains its own genetic instructions, its body contains another, separate set of instructions in the mitochondria and yet a third in its chloroplasts. I raised these animalcules in the dark, feeding them sugar, acetic acid, and other organic compounds; they were scavengers. When I shone light on them, they turned into plants.
This, meanwhile, was Bernd’s childhood:
Before coming to America, I lived with my family as refugees in a forest in northern Germany. We foraged for acorns, beechnuts, mushrooms, and berries. My father had brought rat traps, and we “hunted” small rodents with them as well as with pitfall traps. I recall how my father once trapped a mallard duck in a clever noose made with horsehair. Finding food was our primary concern.
Just holy fuck, I say. This was because of World War II, which I’ve been listening to audio books about recently and also which it seems as if I’m going to need to learn everything there is to know about it. So that I do not repeat the mistakes of the past, of course. And so I get a nice brain full of morbid facts like how when Russian artillerists saw that their 45mm anti-tank shells hit the Panzerkampfwagen Tigers, “but bounced off like peas,” some of them went insane.