Stuff You Should Know - Caterpillars: Nature's Magicians

Episode Date: June 27, 2023

Caterpillars are simply the best. Don't think so? Well listen in and you'll soon agreeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

So, there is a ton of stuff they don't want you to know. Yeah, like does the US government really have alien technology? Or what about the future of AI? What happens when computers actually learn to think? Could there be a serial killer in your town? From UFOs to psychic powers and government cover-ups, from unsolved crimes to the bleeding edge of science, history is riddled with unexplained events. Listen to stuff they don't want you to know on the iHeartRadio app,

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That's right. We are finishing up. These are the last shows of our 2023 tour. We're going to be in Orlando, Florida on August 12th, Nashville, Tennessee on September 6th, and wind it all up here in Atlanta on September 9th. Yes, and you can get all the info you need and links to tickets which are on sale now at our website, stuffyshadknow.com on our tour page, or you can go to link tree slash sysk. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and there's Jerry, the three of us just inching along and

life together trying to make do, making our way in the world today. It takes everything with God. Oh yeah, and this is stuff you should have. Cheers. Cheers, Chuck. Cheers. You know, if it's an episode where we say mouth parts, I knew you were gonna say this. Then we're going back to the old school

from our, let's say former former colleague, Tracy still our colleague. We just never see anyone anymore. Right. Fully our colleague. Tracy Wilson, co-host of the stuff you missed in history class along with Holly. They're wonderful. They've been around for years. They're icons of podcasting.

Tracy used to write a bunch of insect articles for HouseofWorks.com back in the day. She very legendarily stayed up for 72 straight hours and wrote like more than two dozen insect articles in that time. They just got weirder and a lot of it has the time went on. I almost believe that for a second. But Tracy always does a great job with those or did a great job and most of most of the insect articles we've ever used have been Tracy's original, like the ticks and the fleas and I don't think ants.

But these probably was. She's a master of it for sure. I mean, she wrote a lot of them. And this one about caterpillars was from Tracy, along with stuff from World Atlas in the 88 and breeding butterflies.com. But I just realized today when I was researching this some more that we haven't done butterflies yet, which is shocking. We've done one. We did the wings, like the iridescent.

Okay, that's what it was. Yeah, we talked about them in the animal migration episode two. Yeah, but not a standalone on butterflies. So we're going to talk about their counterpart. Mm-hmm. And one of the facts of the episode already for me is that caterpillars that eventually turn into butterflies, it's the same species. It's still the same thing. Right. We should do that.

We should do it too. You didn't? I just figured it, like, well, now it's something else, like entirely. Huh. But did you know about the transformation and the crystalist or cocoon and everything? Did you know that? Oh, sure. Okay. I knew how it happened, but I thought it was like presto-changeo. Now you're not whatever Latin name you are. You're a new Latin name. Oh, gotcha. So like they just became a completely different animal basically or a different insect. Yeah.

Okay, I gotcha. Yeah, no, they're the same thing. They're just configured differently. Yeah, they got wings. Like a transformer. Like they go more than that. More than that. New box to robot with a gun.

That's right. You know, but in a much more organic, soupy way as we'll see. You. I love this one, Chuck. Like every kid knows about caterpillars. You go look at them in the garden and everything and they're super cute and weird looking and you learn the hard way not to touch some of them. But I did not know a lot of this stuff either and it's endlessly fascinating to me, especially

if you step back and think about a life stage where an organism undergoes such a complete transformation that their cells, they break themselves down to their cells and then are rebuilt into a new version. Not that many animals do that. And scientists aren't exactly sure how or even why that evolved, although why is kind of teleological, but how that evolved. It's just this really bizarre thing that we're so aware of, we kind of just take for granted until you really stop and think about it. I love caterpillars, I guess is what I'm trying to say.

Yeah, and it was also one of those where I just kept looking and kept looking. I was like, how has this been sitting here under our noses all this time? I don't know. Because it's right up our alley to talk about something like caterpillars and we're gonna do that right now. Yeah, one of the reasons why they are so different and they're configured differently is that a caterpillar's life is the larval stage of an adult moth or butterfly. That's probably the best easy definition of a caterpillar. The reason that it's configured differently than it's adult form is because in the larval stage, its entire life is pooping, eating pooping, molting, eating pooping, molting. That's what I saw

the caterpillar's life described as over the course of five different molds, as we'll see. That's all it wants to do. It just wants to eat. So it's designed essentially as an eating machine. Yeah, kind of shark-like. And it's Tracy points out, like it's a very singular purpose. And that same butterfly has a singular purpose later on, which is propagating the species,

if you know what I'm saying. But the caterpillar, yeah, it's very sharp, like all it does is eat and store food and poop it out. And they eat so much that apparently they say that they can eat as much as 27 times their body size and their fairly short life. And they can end up being about 100 times bigger at the bigger by the time they go to pupate, which is when they, you know, hold up and turn into the butterfly,

as when they pop out of that little egg, that they also eat. That's amazing. And if you wanna see something just astounding, go look up a caterpillar egg for butterfly egg. I don't know which one you'd call it, but they look like little, have you ever'd call it, but they look like little, have you ever seen Vaseline glass? They look like little, like, ornate Vaseline glass

faces. Yeah, they're very pretty. Yeah, I mean, everything about butterflies are just great. Okay, I'm on board with them fully. But yeah, that thing, I mean, it starts eating, it eats its way out of the egg. Then it says, well, I'll just eat the rest of the egg. And you know what, I'm gonna go ahead and eat this leaf that the egg is sitting on as well while I'm at it. And they said, wow, I really like eating. Maybe I should just keep eating for the rest of my life.

Yeah, each one suddenly turns into a gustous glute and just keeps going from there. That's exactly right. So I said that at mullets, apparently at mullets five different times. And the reason why at mullets is because it eats so much it out grows at skin. It's amazing.

It has a mechanism where it releases an enzyme. There's a hormone that says, hey, you're getting a little, these clothes are getting a little tight. Maybe it's time to mullet. And so that releases an enzyme that basically dissolves its attachment to the excess skeleton. Then the new bigger version pops out of the old excess skeleton, walks away, and guess what it does immediately after. It starts eating again.

It tries to outgrow that suit. It's wearing. It does that five times in its larval stage as a caterpillar. Yeah, these molds are called in-stars. Did you say that? That's the that's the period of its life between molds. Yeah, yeah. So five in-stars in between molds. Like you said, all it's doing is just eating, trying to get a larger suit size. But here's a very another cool fact is they believe that not only do caterpillars have a memory that lasts like a molt or two, but they even think there are researchers at Georgetown that have sort of proven that I'm not going to sort of prove something, but

they feel pretty good about the fact that they think that a butterfly remembers being a caterpillar. Yeah, they've done at least one study that showed that if they trained it to avoid certain smells as one of its last in-stars, it will remember that as an adult butterfly. It will avoid those same smells. That's pretty cool. Because as you'll see, what happens in the chrysalis is so mind bending and nuts that the idea that it can remember anything is, it's pretty, pretty amazing. Oh, yeah, for sure. I didn't even consider that. That is really hard to process.

So let's talk about the body. Like you said, it has mouth parts. Very important because it eats, eats, eats. And the rest of its body is essentially a storage facility for that food that it eats, and that it breaks down and stores essentially is fat. They're very fatty. Yeah, I get the idea that the inner body movement through that body tube never stops. It's just a conveyor belt almost of food coming in

and poop leaving. That's my impression too. Yeah, the caterpillar's six-legged, if you're like, whoa, whoa, chuck. I've seen a caterpillar or two in my day. And they have tons of little legs. Those are not real legs. They only have six genuine legs, meaning that they have segments and joints. The rest of those

are called pro legs. And there are a lot of those. And they move all up the length of the abdomen of the caterpillar. And at the end of those little pro legs, they have little suction cups, little hooks basically. Is it a is it a crescent, do you think? Or a cresce? I'm going crescent. Yeah, they're called creschets. Or croches. And the yeah, croches.

But croch rocket. Didn't that with those really fast motorcycles are called? Sure. Okay. I didn't know if that was, you know, a dirty thing to say or not. No, no, that's all over. It's like douchebag now. It was at one time like not very nice, but now everybody says it.

It even shows really like PG-13 movies. Oh, I thought you meant it was okay to say. You're a real douchebag now, okay. Oh no, no, no, it's not still not. It's still an insane. It's still an insane, but it's not like, you know, a horrid thing to say like it used to be. I gotcha, because someone called me when the other day in a car.

I was like, oh, I thank you. Did they really? No, no. They don't have bones, of course, but they do have lots, they're very musly. If you compare them to a human, we have about 629 muscles. Caterpillars have 4,000 muscles, because those muscles, that's the way they're moving. They move in a little wave from front to back.

Front to back? Yes, front to back. Back to front. Back to front. How did I mess that up? Well, depending on which direction they're going, I guess. Well, I guess so. They move in a couple of ways.

One of two ways is sometimes they're crawling, which means they're moving all of those pro legs and legs at the same time in sequence, or they do what sounds like an inchworm does, right? Yeah, I don't know why they didn't identify them as inchworms, but that's what they're talking about. They can move in little arches where they bring their front to their back and they're back together, making a mound out of their middle or abdomen and then they stretch the front out and then they bring the back out and then they stretch the front out.

That's what an intro room does and that's basically one of two ways the other way for a caterpillar to move. Either as a wave undulating, there's a lot of really cool videos of caterpillars moving or inching along. Yeah, and I never looked close enough at an inchworm to figure out why they moved that way. And I feel like a dummy now, because it seems obvious, they moved that way because their middle section doesn't have legs.

Right. It's pretty cool. Pulls the back because those are where the legs are and the legs go. Let me catch up. It's like a little cute accordion. And it's really neat to see when you watch a close-up of a centipede, I keep on saying centipede, but that's definitely a different animal.

A caterpillar, pro legs moving, as they attach themselves, like you said, they have a suction cup, they just attach themselves to like the branch or whatever that they're walking on. And if you watch it in close enough. Detail? Yes. Excellent. Chuck, you can really see those suction cups working and it's pretty cool. It's awesome. Most things on a caterpillar are small obviously including their little eyelids. They have 12 of those are called stomata. And they, if you do look closely though,

it's really cool looking. They have their range in a semi-circle, sort of wrapping around the head. Like, what's his name from reading Rainbow, but on Star Trek, the next generation? Lavard? Yeah, Lavard Burton. Like his eyewear? Yes. Yeah. That's what I think. Except it would be on top of his head though, right? Like a headband? I think it's more on the front. I thought it was more on top. I thought it was on the front, but you could be right. It could be on top of his head though, right? Like a headband? No, I think it's more on the front. I thought it was more on top. I thought it was on the front, but you could be right.

It could be on top. It's kind of hard to tell with a caterpillar head. Right, exactly. You don't really know what's what. It's kind of like a stuturator. You can't tell which way it's going. Right. That joke was for our agent listener.

That's right. I love a good stuturator, Joe. Yeah, there's one little guy's like damn Skippy. So those Stamata they can identify light and darkness, but caterpillars are basically blind. They're for sure color blind. And they just like I said, they can see sort of light and dark and shadow and stuff like that, but they are not like they're not crawling around seeing things. They're kind of feeling their way around

with those antennae that they have, but although those antennae only handle taste and smell, so I don't even know why I said that. So they also breathe in a really interesting way. They breathe through spiracles, which are holes in the side of the caterpillar, and they breathe in oxygen, it goes directly to the trachea,

and they breathe out carbon dioxide. And as they move, it's kind of like breathing in and breathing out. That's like a byproduct of their movement. And it all goes to that trachea. Like I said, the trachea just defuses it to the tissue throughout the body. They have blood. It's called hemolimp, like most insects blood, but it doesn't, it's not used to transport oxygen. It transports things like hormones that trigger molting and things like that, but the

oxygen just diffuses throughout the body. Yeah, you know, an inchworm, it is like a little accordion. And if you could figure out how to build and insert a tiny little, like, wooden read in in each spherical that little thing might sound like an accordion as it moved. They'd be pretty neat. Kind of cruel, do I imagine? Yeah, I mean probably if you're sticking wood in the tiny breathing holes of a caterpillar. I don't think you would appreciate that. Don't try that.

By the way Chuck, did I tell you that caterpillar is from the old French chatepillos, which means shaggy cat? Oh, like the actor Timothy Chatepillos. Is that? No, that's Timothy Shalamey, sorry. Right. Yeah, Timothy Shaggy Cat would be that name. Kind of looks like a Shaggy Cat.

But apparently they think it was the, is it the woolly bully caterpillar that inspired that? I love that they think that that was the original shaggy cat. And it's just kind of caught on from there. But that's where caterpillar comes from. Yeah, and speaking of woolly bully, you notice on caterpillars a lot of times those little hairs or little quills or spines. Those are called, oh man, we've even had scientists tell us

how to pronounce that AE. Is it Satay? That's what I think it is, yeah. See, that are we've been getting it wrong. I can't remember, but everyone is like in science guys, anytime it's AE, you pronounce the blank in a camera brooch when it is. Satay? Oh, it's either Satay or Satay. And now, we're going to get more emails.

And maybe I should just put a sticky note on my laptop. So I'll always remember that. But that's what they're called. And they have a lot of functions. They can deter things that want to eat caterpillars. Because a lot of times these things carry little irritants and toxins. And you just put a pin in that for our very final segment at the end. But like I said, yeah, you can get a little

irritated bump sometimes if you handle the wrong caterpillar. Oh, yeah, and he shouldn't handle a caterpillar. It can get much worse than that too. Yeah, if you've ever touched the caterpillar, that's why I was referring to earlier, like as a kid, I remember touching one and just being like, oh my God, what just happened? And it hurt very badly, I remember distinctly. But I still love caterpillars after that. I remember there was one kind, and someone will know what kind of this is,

but I think it was sort of yellow and black. And we would put our fingy on the ground, and the caterpillar would crawl up our hand. And then we would like get a leaf and have it crawl off. I don't think we harmed the caterpillar. We were just setting it kind of crawl on us for a minute. But and I wasn't touching the spine, so I never got that irritation, but I used to love doing that.

And I just thought that was so cool that they, guess now knowing that they're blind that there's like crawling on a stick and it's like now I'm crawling on a finger. Right. Yeah, that's cute. But yeah, you wouldn't stick like kid finger. You wouldn't have been touching the hair like structures. So it would have stung you. It's not like I don't think it's an active process. I think it's a passive thing where you just touch it and they're not like die, die, die. It's just like you just touch it and they're not like, die, die, die, it's just like, you just touched it and it did its thing pass over. Yeah. Yeah, I get the feeling the caterpillars even like, sorry man, you know,

shouldn't touch me, but sorry. Most caterpillar seem rather chill, but not all of them are, I was not happy to find this out. I find this rather unpleasant, but there's some species of caterpillars in Hawaii that are actually carnivores. Far and away most species of caterpillars in hence butterflies are herbivores. They just eat leaves. That's what they do. They eat leaves and shoots. Wait, each shoots and leaves.

So there's the ones in Hawaii that they'll eat snails. And not only do they eat snails, it's really awful. They tie the snails to say like a twig or a leaf or something using spinerats. They have silk producing organs. And they'll tie the snail, the whole shell and all to like a twig so the snail can't get away. And then they climb into the shell and eat the snail alive. It is horrifying. I don't like that particular kind of caterpillar, but I like all the rest.

Yeah, they tie it down and eat it. So awful. Imagine it just coming into your house too and you're like, please know and you have no escape and that's that. Yeah, it was pretty horrifying to read that and frankly, disappointing. But there's also a brand, a brand in Australia.

A brand of color, really. They lay their eggs in ant hills, and when they come out, they will eat those ants. But aside from that, in the Hawaiian, they, like you said, are strictly herbivores, and they are using those leaves also to camouflage themselves. They have a lot of great mechanisms to keep this not quite octopus level, but they seem like they're, I don't know if it's wrong to use words smart, but they know to feed under leaves,

so birds can't see them. They also have some natural camouflage, like sometimes those eyes can look like, the fake eyes can look like snakes. Did you see that one? Yeah, it looks like a snake. Yeah, it looks like a bright green snake, and apparently they'll arrange themselves sometimes to make it look like a long snake. Like 300 caterpillars will get together and line up, and it's like, wow, there's a snake. No, it's a line of caterpillars will get together and line up and it's like, wow, there's a snake. No, it's a line of caterpillars. Yeah, like a lot of them are solitary caterpillars, but there is

what was the one in particular that traveling groups? The gregarious caterpillars. Yeah, I get the feeling those are the ones that might do the old snake one too. Yes. I think those are swallow tails and they might be gregarious, yeah. So I say we take a break chuck and then we'll come back and I propose that we talk some more about caterpillars. Let's do it. There's a ton of stuff they don't want you to know.

Does the U.S. government really have alien technology? And what about the future of artificial intelligence, AI? What happens when computers learn to think? Could there be a serial killer in your town? From UFOs to psychic powers and government cover-ups from unsolved crimes to the bleeding edge of science. History is riddled with unexplained events. We spent a decade applying critical thinking to some of the most bizarre phenomenon civilization

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Check out Edge Martinez IRL on the I Heart Radio app on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. Okay so you mentioned a couple of things that they do to protect themselves, camouflage, just eating a little bit on the underside of a leaf. There's a lot of other things that they can do too. There's so many different species of caterpillar. Because again, we're talking about moths and butterflies. They're not just all the same thing that they've developed. All sorts of really interesting means of defense. One of the ways

they say the best defense is shooting your poop out. And there's a type of caterpillar that does that. I think it's the silver spotted skipper. And skipper is basically a type of butterfly. And it shoots its waste called frass, it's poop. As far as five feet from itself, in order to keep predators from being able to track it back to its source. That explains that old saying, uh, you ain't nothing but caterpillar

for us. Mm hmm. I never knew it. You're really good at jumping. That's what they say to you. Uh, yeah. And that's one of the things they do, like several other things, which is it all sort of falls in the umbrella of, I don't want, uh, anyone to know I'm like even here. So a poop will be a big giveaway, obviously. Another is if, like they love to eat, if a predator sees a ton of chewed up leaves everywhere, they're gonna be like, ooh, the caterpillars nearby, I love to eat those things. So as much as those caterpillars love to eat, it is their singular purpose in life, they will, many times, just eat little bits off of many, many leaves to kind of disguise the fact. Like, no caterpillar

here, there's just a few nibbles here and there. Yeah, just leaf rather than just, yeah, rather than just like taking a leaf down to its spine. Yeah, which any, even the dumbest of birds can be like, there's a caterpillar around here and you know They want to do that, but they still don't do it. Oh no caterpillars have tremendous self control We mentioned that they have spinner rats that they can spin silk and they use it to great effect and all sorts of different ways including defense apparently some kinds of Apparently some kinds of caterpillars will like spin a little thing of silk that they'll attach to the leaf They're on and when a predator comes they just jump off. Yeah, basically like John McLean and Diehard

Uh-huh, and they're attached to the to the silk so they swing into you know a window in the Nakatomi building Right and then climb back up when the bird goes away, but they just jump off the leaf to get away It's all but that's pretty neat to see. That's right. And to combat jet lag, they make fists with their toes. Yeah. What do you know? I wonder if they leap.

I'd like to see that in slow motion. I wonder if all those legs and pro legs at once do that in concert. That would be pretty cool. Or if they inch, they just shoot themselves off. They inch so quickly that shoots them right off of the leaf. Yeah. So yeah, that's one used to the silk is like literal climbing rope.

And like we said, like the solo caterpillar, which is many of the, I can't say brands, what a dummy. Varieties, species. There you go. You know, there's going around, they're eaten, they're laying an egg, they're using the silk as a like a lasso or maybe they might make a little nest. Like we said earlier, maybe they might restrain that snail. But those gregarious kinds that live in big groups, they really get going with the silk

production. They make big nests in trees and around tree trunks. You've probably seen them before. Oh yeah, they're like big tents basically. If you've seen big, you know, it looks like sort of a really dense spider web. I guess sometimes those are spiders, right? Yeah, there's some kinds of spiders that do that,

but I think probably more often than not what you're seeing are gregarious caterpillars getting together. Yeah, but they also use their little spinerets as like a trail, like hey, we're all going this way and we're gonna lay this little trail and we know that if you wanna get home, this is how you get home. What's neat is those trails are often intergenerational

and so like an older generation will leave that silk for the next generation to use, and that next generation then can grow bigger and stronger because they didn't have to use that energy to create the silk for that leads to the food source. I thought that was pretty nice. Yeah, like handy down silk. Yeah, exactly. Or like, you know, link link of rope that grandpa gave you.

Yeah. Same thing. Hand me down silk. Link the rope from grandpa. What else? There's another thing too that we haven't quite figured out. And we, I mean, the entomology world, and by we also mean them. It may or may not be advantageous to live in a

gregarious community as opposed to being solitary. Because yes, it's easier to build a big shelter for yourself. If you have a bunch of other friends helping you, it's easier to find food. If you have other people looking at the same time you are and then telling you what they found, but at the same time, you're also competing with those same people, or the same caterpillars, I should say. And that's a big, that can be a big problem too. Yeah, I like caterpillars or people too.

Exactly. And if there's a disease, you know, it's going to spread pretty readily within that population, if they're all living together. But I think, you know, we've held off long enough, we should we should talk about that metamorphosis. Okay. Which is what everyone wants to know about. And that is basically a caterpillar is doing its thing. It's going through those molds. It's that fifth molt. And they say, you know what? This has been great. But I think I'm tired of eating finally. I'm going to go off and wander off into the woods and find a safe spot. And I'm going to pupate everybody.

And when you see me again, I will be the most beautiful thing you've ever seen. Yeah, pretty neat. And this is where the terminology gets really confusing if you do any research on this. Yeah, I can for sure. So the pupa is often referred to as the form, the body form that the centipede or that the caterpillar is in as it enters the transformation, right? Yes.

It's actually the life stage like the caterpillar is the larval life stage, the butterfly or the moth is the adult, the pupa is the life stage in between. But for all intents and purposes, you can also say that's a butterfly pupa, although, or that's a moth pupa, right? That's the easiest, most understandable part of it. It starts to get really strange from there because the butterfly caterpillar, when it emerges from that fifth molt, it has a special kind of skin on it. And over time, when it turns upside down and hangs from a leaf and begins its transformation, that skin hardens, and it forms basically the protective layer that's going to protect that caterpillar-turned-butter butterfly as it undergoes its transformation.

And that's called a chrysalis, but just butterfly caterpillars do that, right? Not moths. I think that's right. And then I think it's just moths because they don't form chrysalis or chrysalis. They are the only ones to spin a cocoon to protect themselves, correct?

Right, and that cocoon starts protect themselves, correct? Right. And that cocoon starts out kind of soft, but that eventually hardens as well. But I think that's right. But the chrysalis itself is not some like shell they build. Like it is, it is the thing. Yeah, it's the outer layer of skin. Okay. Yeah, because it can actually twitch and move as a defense. Yeah.

Like it's a thinking sentient, well, not thinking this early, but it is a shell that is a living thing. It's not like, let me build this, you know, this thing to get into. It is the thing that it is in. Right. So imagine if you underwent this transformation, you would probably go off into a corner and kind of ball up, maybe in a bit of a fetal position, but then imagine as part of this process, all of your skin fused together and turned into like an outer shell rather than, you know, this thing covering you, it's like this now this big ball that you're now kind of separated from inside and you're doing your thing inside.

That's kind of like what the chrysalis is like. Yeah. And so we mentioned the silk like the uses as like a climbing rope and stuff like that and to build little nests. It really comes in handy when it's time to pupate because they use this silk in a variety of ways. There's more than one way to skin a cat and there's more than one way for a caterpillar to metamorphosize.

Sometimes, like you said, they hang upside down from that leaf, so they've spun like a little silk pad that attaches to something. Sometimes, they create like a little hammock. Sometimes, they make like a little sling in concert with a stick. There are different ways that they can do this, but it always involves using silk

to sort of stabilize itself, either upside down or right side, upper sideways or whatever. And then they start to do that thing, whether it's a moth spinning that cocoon or just the gradual transformation of caterpillar into chrysalis. Right. And then so once that happens,

once the cocoon is full or the chrysalis. Right, and then so once that happens, once the cocoon is full or the chrysalis is hardened, this, and one of the most amazing things that on earth happens in there, and it's neat because we've gotten to the point where we have photography that can peer inside of this without harming the caterpillar, and they have like time lapse videos of this transformation. And as the thing turns more and more into what's obviously like a butterfly or a moth, and you see it hanging upside coma, the movie version. It's really neat, but it also gives you this. It has this kind of regal and majestic feel to it as well.

I produced a lot of emotions in me, apparently. Yeah, I mean, this isn't the science-y explanation, but it's almost as if you can take a tray of, put a bunch of spaghetti and meatballs in a dish and cover it up, and then when you open it up, it's a lasagna. Yeah. And you're like, how did that happen? How did that even happen? So this is how it happens. The caterpillar breaks itself down into a soup of cells, like it's basically like a caterpillar soup for a while.

And some of the cells keep their form generally or at least stay attached to one another. So those leg cells, they change, they look different. Like a caterpillar's actual true legs look different from the butterflies' true legs, but they're still the same cells. They rearrange themselves a little bit. Most of the other cells just completely come apart. Turn into imaginal cells, which are analogous to our stem cells, and that they can turn into any kind of cell. And then it reconfigures itself using the same cells, same amount, same everything, into a butterfly. It reconfigures itself over the course of about two weeks.

It's unbelievable. Yeah, it really is. Like my brain breaks every time I try to make sense, especially when you see what comes out. You know, I mean, if it came out looking like a dung beetle, like that would still be awesome, but to come out looking like a butterfly with those iridescent wings and the little faces on those wings, it's just unbelievable. And I guess, I mean, evolutionarily speaking, this is all to eventually get to like a pollinator.

I don't understand that this is where I think that science has kind of thrown off. They're like, the best explanation I saw is that it's better than having two things compete for the same food source, but that doesn't really make any sense, you know, because that doesn't make any sense to me at all. I don't understand that, but that was the best explanation I saw and I didn't even understand it. So as to the why?

Yeah. Yeah. Like, it's just so strange. I just don't understand it. And everything goes through life stages. We go through puberty. We become adults. We go from infant babies to grown adults. But there's not a period where we stop, and over the course of two weeks, completely reconfigure ourselves into a new form. There's not that many things out there that do do that,

and we just don't fully understand why it happens, and maybe we never will, and I think that'd be just fine. Although I would argue that the Josh Clarke I knew 15 years ago has catapillar-like, has now emerged as a beautiful butterfly. Thank you. I remember reading when Christopher Hitchens became a conservative. One of the the liberal members of parliament said that this is one of the rare instances where the butterfly turns back into a slug. Oh no. Yeah. Wow. I like to hear what that exit. I think I've written 2007 and it's still stuck with me.

Yeah, that's a good one. We didn't take our second break, did we? No, it's time. All right. Well, let's take our second break. We'll probably still be talking about this metamorphosis, you know, when we come back. So just be prepared. There's a ton of stuff they don't want you to know. Does the U.S. government really have alien technology?

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It's called holo metabolism. Yeah, that full transformation. And I don't think we said it takes a couple of weeks, generally. Yeah, I saw about two weeks, something like that on average. It can be more or less depending on the weather and stuff. Yeah, and I took it as depending on the weather meaning, is that they don't want to do this in the middle of winter. So if they get started in like winter comes early,

maybe they'll just stay in there for a few months, is that right? There are some species that overwinter in their cocoon or in their chrysalis, and that's part of their thing. But I saw that there's an ideal temperature. That's what I took it to mean. And that the ideal temperature is 21 degrees Celsius and get this buddy. I converted it to Fahrenheit using some of the

that we talked about the other day. So you did it yourself? Yeah it's like I wrote it down. I could do it again if I wanted to but I'm just gonna find what I wrote down. I think it's like 88 89 degrees Fahrenheit. All right I love it when after all these years. It's 81. You're still brave enough to put yourself out there with math. Here I'll just do this okay so here we go. You're still brave enough to put yourself out there with math. Here. I'll just do this. Okay. So here we go Signed fair and height 21 degrees Celsius. So it's 21 plus 32. Okay. We're getting everything back equal again. So what is that 56? Times 1.8. I believe comes to 81 When was the last time you did

sort of Written down long division or something like that? Oh, it's been a long time. By the way, it's 84.6. 84.6. Can you still do that stuff? I don't know probably if I gave enough time to it, sure. I just did just just it's not a part of my life anymore.

I actually don't know if I remember how to do long division. I recently Because Ruby is starting, you know, like this past year started like multiplication and stuff and Came at me with like a three digit times a two digit and I was like, oh, you know what? I was like I got it. I got it. I remember and I remember how to do that and carry the stuff But I definitely don't think I could do long division anymore. I don't, I sort of remember, but I don't think I would fully be able to complete a problem. By the way, I, I, I know I brushed past it because I don't handle compliments that well,

but I do appreciate the comment about me, I'm out of morphicizing into a butterfly. Well, that was a joke. I'm just kidding. Well, definitely edit this part out. No, it was for sure true. I appreciate you appreciating that. So did we just come back from that break? Is that really coming on here? Yeah, that's what's going on.

But we can wrap it up and talk about catapillar management because here's the deal. Catapillars eat leaves and they can eat garden stuff if you have a garden that you're planting, but it's not that big a deal like individual caterpillars are not going to ravage your garden and spoil your garden. If you have big groups of those gregarious caterpillars, they can cause problems. But if you see caterpillars in your garden, don't overreact and be like, I got to start killing all these caterpillars.

Take a breath, assess your problem. Are they ravaging your garden? Or do you just have some caterpillars here and there? Because you want those butterflies later on, don't you? Right, yeah, definitely. That's a big part. And it's not just for their beauty either caterpillars and butterflies alike are a food source for birds, which is sad But it that's part of the circle of life, I guess. So that's one reason alone

They're also probably even more important for your garden pollinators. Yeah Big-time pollinators There was a dead milkman joke in there, I couldn't quite make it. But they, so they pollinate, they're a food source. In most caterpillars, although all of them eat leaves, and again, like we said, they're eating machines, the amount of damage they're doing is really kind of pales in comparison to the benefits you get from having them in your ecosystems. So for the most part, you want to just leave them alone.

Yeah. I mean, there's a whole section if you're interested on how to kill and get rid of caterpillars at howstofworks.com in this article, but I don't even feel like talking about it to be honest. Well, let's talk about gregarious caterpillars because those are the ones that really are problematic. They can, on a bad year or a good year for the Gregorius caterpillars, they can consume up to a quarter of the leaves in a forest.

And if they attack the same tree enough times, they'll kill a tree. So gypsy moth caterpillars are Gregorius and they're well known for killing trees just from eating the leaves off of it That's how much damage they can do and they can also harm crops too So gregarious caterpillars you actually probably do want to get rid of if you come across it But the key is prevention like you look for the eggs which form a ring around like a tree branch and take care of those then like don't Don't try to deal with them later. It's gonna be too late.

You wanna be proactive. They say the best defense is shooting your poop, five feet away from you. Yeah, I mean, I guess if you're in forest management or if you're a farmer and it heads like a literal effect on your crops and your forest and stuff like that, they're out there, you know, burning tents and nests and things like that. But that's not, you know, burning tents and nests and things like that.

But that's not something you should go out and try to do because you don't wanna catch something on a tree on fire. Mm-hmm. Just not a good idea. But can you just see somebody trying to get to caterpillar something? You can be like that.

Uh-oh. And they just started a wildfire? Yes, I can. I really can. It's hilarious if you think about it. It's so dope. It is. Should we finish up with the assassin caterpillar? Well, can I talk about one more thing you don't want to talk about just for a second? Because I think it's kind of nuts as well. Okay. There's a bacterium called bacillus thyrin-gNS, I believe, the DT for short. This is a bacteria that people purposely introduce as a caterpillar control measure. And it produces holes in the caterpillar's gut and leads to sepsis and it dies a painful death a few days after being infected.

This is considered organic gardening. The problem is it doesn't just target caterpillars. You don't want it. It targets all caterpillars. And it's also a pretty terrible way to die. So I think I'm with you, Chuck, man. I think you just, you say the caterpillars are here to stay as long as we're not gregarious. I'm just going to let them live and let live.

Yeah. Okay. I just wanted to get on that soapbox for a second. Yeah, I'm with you. So I mentioned the assassin caterpillar. This is the Lonomia obliqua or the giant silkwormoth or the assassin caterpillar. It is the devious caterpillar in the world. And there have been supposedly several hundred people in South America that have died from the toxin injected from this caterpillar quills.

From the satay. Yeah, I think it takes a lot, like even if one of them injected some toxin into you, you're going to be uncomfortable and it probably won't feel great. But I think you need to get like, you know, 20 to 100 times that to actually kill you. Yet it still happens. Yeah, it does. Apparently it's responsible for 500 deaths around South America. I think total, like in all time,

as far as documented goes, it takes a lot, like I think 20 to 100 times to kill you, but the way that it kills you is it's anti-coagulant, a very powerful one, and you die of internal bleeding essentially. Yeah, it's die of internal bleeding essentially. Yeah, it's a blood thinner. Yeah. And that actually is being studied.

The toxins in that particular caterpillar being studied for its usefulness in biomedicine. Yeah, I think there are only, what is it, there's like 32 species of linomia, but only two of those have that blood thinner venom, the obliquia, and then the akelas. But the rest will still sting you. It's just not going to kill you.

It'll still hurt. That's South America. In North America, the biggest one we have is the pus caterpillar, P-U-S-S, a megalopage upper chularis, the southern flannel moth, and just accidentally brushing it can cause excruciating pain, I've seen. So just be careful. Like, admire catapillars with your eyes, not with your hands. Yeah, I guess I got lucky as a kid, but I just let them crawl on me for a minute, but

yeah, I never felt that sting. There's one other thing too, the Eastern tent caterpillars are problematic, especially in places like Kentucky, because they cause what's called mayor reproductive loss syndrome, where just I think 50 grams, which is a tenth of a pound, of these caterpillars ingested by a horse while it's foraging,

can cause it to lose its fetus, have a stillborn birth. All sorts of crazy stuff. So much so that it has a whole syndrome named after it, and it's just for meeting these caterpillars. Oh wow. Isn't that crazy? That is.

This is a good one. I thought you'd like that. Yeah, caterpillars are great. I think we should do a two-parter with butterflies. Oh, should we? Sure. I think Tracy wrote that one too. Okay, I say we get do a two-parter with butterflies. Oh, should we? Sure. I think Tracy wrote that one too. OK, I say we get on a adventure.

I was going to suggest that, but then I thought, is that too much? I don't know. I don't know. I guess they don't have to come out back to back. They can be companion pieces. How about that? They're back to back, and then we

can skip the metamorphosis part. OK. Well, while we're figuring that out, I say everybody, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this stuff you should know across the, I was very excited because one of our listeners, well I'll just read it, I'll let you hang on that for a second. Hey guys, when my wife Katie and I were dating we would meet up at lunch to do the daily crossword together.

I proposed to her 20 years ago using a crossword I constructed myself. And years later it's not only crosswords, but stuff you should know. It keeps our marriage life vibrant. It gives us something to talk about every week and needless to say your recent episode on crossword puzzles brought our life together full circle. About 10 years after we married, I became a published crossword constructor and have been, I've continued to recense with puzzles and LA times Wall Street Journal, New York Times, among others. So Jeff is his pretty experience as a crossie maker. As a thank you for a wonderful episode, I'm sending

you an original puzzle that stuff you should know theme. Wow. For you to enjoy. Wow. And I haven't done it yet. It is printed out in my office. You sent me just a, you know, it's not a digital version. So I can't do it on my phone. I got to get out the open soul. Nice.

Which would be kind of fun. And I can't wait to tackle it. I'm just been waiting for the right window of time and that is from Jeff Stillman and big shout out to Jeff at his wife Katie. I don't know how I missed that one but I'm glad you called it out because I can't wait to do that puzzle too. So thanks Jeff. Yeah yeah good Jeff Stillman go with your emails and print that sucker out. Yes well thank you to you both Jeff and Katie and if you want to be like Jeff and send to some amazing thing, that's fine with us. You can send a via email to stuffpodcast.iHeartRadio.com.

Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. So, there is a ton of stuff they don't want you to know. Yeah, like does the US government really have alien technology? Or what about the future of AI? What happens when computers actually learn to think? Could there be a serial killer in your town? From UFOs to psychic powers and government cover-ups,

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