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Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and there's Jerry. The three of us just inchin along in life together, trying to make do, making our way in the world today. It takes everything with go oh yeah, and this is Stuff you should Know. Cheers, Cheers, Chuck, cheers.
You know, if it's an episode where we say mouth parts, I.
Knew you're gonna say this.
Then we're going back to the old school from our let's not say former colleague, Tracy is still our colleague. We just never see anyone anymore, right fully, But Tracy Wilson a 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 HowStuffWorks dot com back in the day.
She very legendarily stayed up for seventy two straight hours and wrote like more than two dozen insect articles in that time. They just got weirder as 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 bees probably was.
She's the 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 at List in the eighty eight and Breeding Butterflies dot com. But I just realized today when I was researching this some more that we haven't done butterflies yet, No, which is shocking.
We've done one.
We did the wings like that you're desk, Okay.
That's what it was. Yeah, And 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 their counterpart. And one of the facts of the episode already for me is that but caterpillars that eventually turned into butterflies, it's the same species. It's still the same thing.
Right.
We should never knew that we should do it too.
You didn't.
I just figured it, like, well, now it's something else like.
In huh, but did you know about the transformation and the chrysalis or cocoon and everything? Did you know that?
Was sure? I knew how it happened, but I thought it was like Presto Chaninjo. Now you're 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, like a transformer, Like they go for the box to robot with the 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 to 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 it's 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 I kept looking and kept looking. I was like, how has just 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 its 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 molts. As we'll see, that's all it does. 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 as Tracy points out, like it's a very singular purpose. And the 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 shark 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 twenty seven times their body size and their
fairly short life. Yeah, and they can end up being about one hundred times bigger at the by the time they go to pupe eight, which is when they you know, hole 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 want to see something just astounding, go look up a caterpillar egg or butterfly egg. I don't know which one you'd call it, but they look like little have you ever seen vasaline glass huhuh? They look like little like ornate vasaline glass vases.
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's as well, I'll just eat the rest of the egg. And you know I'm gonna start I'm gonna go ahead and eat this leaf that the egg is sitting on as well while I'm at it.
Uh huh.
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 Augustus g loop and just keeps going from there.
That's exactly right.
So I said that at molts. Apparently it molts five to diferent times, and the reason why it molts is because it eats so much it outgrows its 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 your closes are getting a little tight. Maybe it's time to mold. And that releases an enzyme that basically dissolves its attachment to the exoskeleton. And then the new, bigger version pops out of the old exoskeleton, walks away, and guess what it does immediately after it starts eating again.
Yeah, it tries to outgrow that suits.
And it does that five times in its larval stage as a caterpillar.
Yeah, these molts are called in stars. Did you say that's the.
That's the period of its life between molts.
Yeah, yeah, so five in stars in between molts. Like you said, all it's doing is just eating, trying to get a larger suit size. But here's another cool fact is they believe that not only do caterpillars have a memory that lasts like a mold or two. But they even think There are researchers at Georgetown that have sort of proven that. I'm not how you 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 this 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, that 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, it's fat. They're very fatty.
Yeah. I get the idea that the 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 that's my impression too.
Yeah, the caterpillar is six legged. If you're like, 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 crochet?
Do you think I think that'schet.
I'm going with crochet.
Yeah, they're called cruschettes and the yeah crotchets a crack rocket. Isn't that what 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. It was at one time like not very nice, but now everybody says it so evenly, like PG. Thirteen movies.
Oh, I thought you meant it was okay to say, yes, you're a real douchebag.
Okay, Oh no, no, no, it's not still not, but it's not like, you know, a horrid thing to say like it used to.
I gotcha because someone called me one the other day in the car and 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 muscly. If you compare them to a human, we have about six hundred and twenty nine muscles. Caterpillars have four thousand muscles. Because those muscles, that's the way they're moving, you know. They 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, it depends on which the direction they're going.
I guess, well, I guess so, and they move in 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 it sounds like an inchworm does. Right.
Yeah, I don't know why they didn't identify them as inch worms, but that's what they're talking about. They can move in little arches where they bring their their front to their back and their back together, making a mound out of their middle their abdomen, and then they stretch the front out and they bring the back up, and then they stretch the front up. That's what an inch worm 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 like really cool videos of caterpillars moving or inching along.
Yeah, and I never looked close enough at an inch worm to figure out why they move that way. And I feel like a dummy now because it seems obvious they move that way because their middle section doesn't have legs, right, It's pretty The front 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 wanting to say centipede, but that's definitely a different animal. Caterpillars 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 islets. They have twelve of those are called stemata, and they if you do look closely though, it's really cool looking. They have their arrange in a semicircle sort of wrapping around the head.
Like what's his name from Reading Rainbow but on Star Trek the next generation?
Yeah, lebar Burton. Like his eye wear.
Yes, yeah, that's what I said.
It would be on top of his head though, right, like like a headband. I think is it 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 the caterpillar head.
Right exactly. You don't really know what's what. It's kind of like a studio baker. You can't tell which way it's going, right that our aged listeners love a good studi baker, Joe.
Yeah, there's well, little guys like damn skippy. Uh. So those stamata they can identify light and darkness, but caterpillars are are basically blind. Uh, 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 trichia, like I said, and the trachia just diffuses it to the tissue throughout the body.
They have blood, it's called hemolymph 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 inch worm, it is like a little accordion. And if you could figure out how to build and insert a tiny little like wooden reed in each sphiracle, that little thing might sound like an accordion as it moved pretty neat, kind of cruel to I imagine.
Yeah, I mean probably if you're sticking wood in the tiny breathing holes of a caterpillar.
I don't think it would. Don't try that.
By the way, Chuck, did I tell you that caterpillar is from the old French chateapellos, which means shaggy cat.
Oh, like the actor Timothy Chateapellos. Is that you know that's Timothy Shallomey.
Sorry, right, yeah, Timothy Shaggy cat would be that name.
Kind of looks like a shaggy cat.
But apparently they think it was the the is it the wooly bully caterpillar? That? Yeah, 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 wily 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? Stay?
That's what I think it is.
Yeah, it's either that or we've been getting it wrong. I can't remember. But everyone is like in science guys. Anytimes it's ae, you pronounce the blank and I can't remember which one it is. Oh, it's either sete or setae. And now we're gonna 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 you said, yeah, but you can get, you know, little little irritated bumps. Sometimes if you handle the wrong caterpillar.
Oh yeah, and you shouldn't handle a category can get much worse than that too. Yeah, if you've ever touched a 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 what just happened? And it hurt very badly, I remember distinctly, but I still love caterpillars after that.
I remember, Uh, there was one kind and someone will know what kind ofness is, but I think it was sort of yellow and black. Uh. And we would, you know, put our finger on the ground and the caterpillar would crawl up our hand and then we would like get a leaf and have it crawl off. So I don't think we harmed the caterpillar. We were just sitting it kind of crawl on us for a minute. But uh. 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 I 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 fingers.
You wouldn't have been touching the hair like structures, so it wouldn't 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, right, you just touched it and it did its thing.
Yeah. Yeah, I get the fear in the caterpillars even like, sorry man, and you know it shouldn't touch me, but sorry.
Most caterpillars 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, and hence butterflies are are herbivores. They just eat leaves, that's what they do. They eat leaves and shoots. Wait, eat shoots and leaves. So there's the ones in Hawaii. 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 spinnerets. 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 a 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. They lay their eggs and 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 you know, I don't know if it's wrong to use words smart, but they know to like 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 snake.
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 three hundred 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 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 talked more about caterpillars.
Let's do it, jow.
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 it's the silver spotted skipper, and skipper is basically a type of butterfly, and it shoots its waist called frast 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, you ain't nothing but caterpillar frass. M I never knew what they You're.
Really good at jumping, that's what they say to you.
Yeah, And that's one of the things they do, like several other things, which is it all sort of falls to the umbrella of I don't want anyone to know I'm like even here, so a poop will be a big giveaway obviously. Another as if like they love to eat. If 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, 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.
No, caterpillars have tremendous self control, you doo. We mentioned that they have spinnerets that they can spin silk, and they use it to great effect in all sorts of different ways, including defense. 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, basically like John McClean and die Hard,
and they're attached to the silk. So they swing into a window in the Knokotomi building and then climb back up when the bird goes away. But they just jump off the leaf to get away. I'll bet 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 use of the silk is like literal climbing rope. And like we said, like the solo caterpillar, which is many of the Wan's say brands, what a dummy varieties species here you go. You know, there's going around, they're eating, they're they're laying an egg. They're using the silk as as like a lasso. Or maybe they might make a little nest. Like we said earlier,
maybe they might restrain that 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 spinnerets as like a trail, like, hey, we're all going this way and we're gonna lay this little trail and we know that. You know, if you want to get home, this is how you get home.
What's neat is those trails are often intergenerational, and so like an older and older generation will leave there that 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 that leads to the to the food source. I thought that was pretty nice.
Yeah, like handy down silk, yeah exactly, Or like you know a link of rope that grandpa gave you.
Yeah, same thing, hand me down silk length of 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 that 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 those same caterpillars. I should say, yeah, and that's a big that can be a big problem too. I like it.
Caterpillars are people too, exactly, and if there's a disease, you know it's gonna 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, which is what everyone wants to know about, and that is basically a caterpillar is doing its thing. It's going through those molts. It's that fifth molt. And they say, you know what, it's been great, But I
think I'm tired of eating. Finally, m M. I'm going to go off and wander off into the woods. I'm going to find a safe spot and I'm going to pew 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, it can for sure. So the pupa.
Is often referred to as the form, the body form that the centipede 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 mold, it has a she'll 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 that caterpillar turned butterfly as it undergoes its transformation,
and that's called the crystalis 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 crysalie. They are the only ones to spin a cocoon to 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 is not some like shell they build like it. 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 it's a thing thinking sentient, well, not thinking necessarily, 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 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 this you know, this thing covering you. It's it's like this now this big ball that you're now kind of separated from inside and you're doing your thing inside. Oh yeah, 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 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 crysalis 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 moth, and you see it hanging upside down just forming it looks it looks like a cross between an hr Geiger painting and Michael Crichton's 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 it's 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? Like how did that even happen?
So this is how it happens. The caterpillar breaks itself down to 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, yeah, they change. They look different like a caterpillar's actual true legs, look different from the butterfly's true legs, but they're still the same cells. They're just 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 mm hmm, 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 yea, 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 it. This is where I think they 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's 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 Clark I knew fifteen years ago his caterpillar like has now emerged as a beautiful butterfly.
Thank you. I remember reading when Christopher Hitchins became a Conservative. One of the Liberal members of parliament said that this is one of the rare instances where the butterfly turns backward. Lug.
Oh no, yeah, wow, I'd like to hear what that exit.
I think I read that in two thousand and seven and it still stuck with me.
Yeah, that's a good one. We didn't take our second break, did we.
Nope, 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.
Softly jaw.
So all right, I mean, I guess we're done talking about metamorphosis. It's called holo metabolism. Yeah, that full transformation. And I don't think he 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 and like winter comes early, maybe it'll they'll just stay in there for a few months. Is that right?
There are some species that over winter in their cocoon or in their chrysalis, and that's just part of their thing. But I saw that there's that the ideal there's an ideal temperature. That's what I took it to mean. Oh okay, and that the ideal temperature is twenty one degree celsius. And get this, buddy, I converted to affarent height using we talked about the other day.
So you did it yourself.
Yeah, it's like, uh, I I love 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 eighty eight eighty nine degrees fahrenheits.
All right, I love it when after all.
These eighty one it's eighty one, you're.
Still brave enough to put yourself out there with math.
Here, I'll just do this, okay. So here we find fahrenheit from twenty one degree celsius. So it's twenty one plus thirty two. Okay, we're getting everything back equal again. So what is that fifty six times one point eight I believe comes to eighty one.
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 eighty four point six.
Eighty four point six. Can you still do that stuff?
I don't know, probably if I gave enough time to it. Sure, I just just it's not a part of my life. Yeah 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 of two digit and I was like, oh, you know what, it was like, I got it. I got it. I remember, and I remember how to do that and to 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 know I brushed past it because I don't handle compliments that well. But I do appreciate the comment about me metamorphosizing into a butterfly.
That was a joke. I'm just kidding.
We'll definitely edit this part.
No, it was for sure true. I appreciate you appreciating that.
So did we just come back from ad break? Is that really on here?
Yeah, that's what's going on. But we can wrap it up and talk about caterpillar management, because here's the deal. Caterpillars eat leaves, and you know they can 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 gonna ravage your garden and spoil your garden. If you have big groups of those gregarious caterpillars, they
can cause problems. But you know, if you see caterpillars in your garden, don't like, don't overreact and be like, I gotta, I gotta start killing all these caterpillars. You know, take a breath, assess your problem. Are they ravaging your garden or do you just have some caterpillars here and there, like 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 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 was a dead milkman joke in there. I couldn't quite I couldn't quite
make it. But so they pollinate their food source, and 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 ecosystem. 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 holstuffworks dot 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 gregarious caterpillars, they can consume up to a quarter of the leaves in a forest. Yeah, and they if they attack the same tree enough times, they'll kill a tree. So gypsy moth caterpillars are gregarious and they're well known for killing tree 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 try to deal with them later, it's going to be too late. You want to 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 has like a literal effect on your crops and your forests and stuff like that. They're out there, you know, burning tents and nests and things like that, but that's not something you should go out and try to do because that's you don't want to catch something on a tree on fire. Just not a good idea.
But can you just see somebody trying to get rid of caterpillars like that and you just started a wildfire?
Yes? I can't, I really can.
It's hilarious if you think about it, it's so doode 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 Basillis thryingienis I believe ET for short. This is a bacteria that people purposely introduce as a as a caterpillar control measure, and it goes in and create It produces holes in the caterpillars 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 they're not gregarious. I'm just gonna 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 capor pillar. This is the Linomia obliqua or the giant silkworm moth, or the assassin caterpillar. It is the deadliest 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 sette. Yeah, I think it takes a lot. Like even if one of them, you know, 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, twenty to one hundred times that to actually kill you. Yet it still happens.
Yeah, it does. Apparently it's responsible for five hundred deaths around South America I think total, like in all time as far as documented goes. Yeah, it takes a lot, like I think twenty to one hundred times to kill you. But the way that it kills you is it's anticoagulant, a very powerful one, and you die of inturn bleeding essentially.
Yeah, it's a it's a blood thinner.
Yeah, and that's that actually is being studied. The toxins in that particular caterpillar being studied for its usefulness in biomedicine.
Yeah, I think they're only what is it, there's like thirty two species of Linomia, but only two of those have that blood thinner venom, the obliqua and then the achillis.
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 puss caterpillar. Puss megalopige upper cularis the southern flannel moth, and just accidentally brushing it can cause excruciating pain I've seen. So just be careful, like admire caterpillars with your eyes, not with your hands.
Yeah. I guess I got lucky as a kid by just letting them crawl on me for a minute. But yeah, I never 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 fifty 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 berth, all sorts of crazy stuff, so much so that it has a whole syndrome named after and it's just from eating 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 on a bench.
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 we're back to back and then we can skip the metamorphosis marms.
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 acrossy. 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 twenty years ago using a crossword I constructed myself, and years later it's not only crosswords, but stuff you should know
that 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 ten years after we married, I became a published crossword constructor and have been. I've continued ever since with puzzles in La Times, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, among others. So, Jeff is pretty experience is a cross
the maker. As a thank you for a wonderful episode, I'm sending you an original puzzle, the stuff you should know, theme you to enjoyed. Wow, And I haven't done it yet. It is printed out in my office. A sent me, just a you know, send us. It's not a digital version, so I can't I can't do it on my phone. I got to get out the old pencil nice, which would be kind of fun, and I can't wait to tackle it. I've just been waiting for the right window
of time. And that is from Jeff Stillman and big shout out to Jeff and 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, got Jeff Stillman, go look at 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 us some amazing thing that's fine with us, you can send it via email to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
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