Jad Abumrad

Well, uh, Matthew Cobb told me this story about this guy.

Schwamadam.

Schwamadam, okay.

That's Jan Schwamadam, a Dutch microscopist from the 1600s.

And the caterpillar.

and even its legs that are actually already formed even before pupation takes place.

So you peel back the skin of a caterpillar and beneath it you see the new creature hidden.

That's so bizarre.

It's like if you were to skin me and my 70-year-old self is inside of me or something.

Wait, and the wings also survive the goo?

Yeah, so it's like the caterpillar will actually start to grow little tiny adult parts that are super thin and transparent.

And it just keeps them tightly rolled up and hidden up against the edges of the chrysalis.

But they don't actually ever go through the goo or become the goo.

I don't know, it's kind of eerie.

Like, it's not just what of me carries forward into the future.

It's like, what of my future self is in me right now?

Thanks to our producers this hour, Tim Howard, Molly Webster, Jesse Cox.

And thanks to you guys for listening.

Real quick, before I let you go, I wanted to tell you that we shared an amazing story on our feed about the butterfly researcher you just heard, Dr. Martha Weiss, and how she later befriended a little boy on the other side of the world who wanted to do his own caterpillar memory study.

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