Josh Clark

Yeah, they got wings.

Like a transformer.

Like they go from boombox to robot with a gun.

You know, but in a much more organic, soupy way, as we'll see.

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, 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.